Why it works: Orange and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,212 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓
Orange Marmalade, Pounded
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the oranges
Cut the Seville oranges into 4 pieces and place the juice and pulp in a basin, removing seeds and skins.
Boil the rinds in hard water until tender, changing the water 2 or 3 times.
Drain the rinds well and pound them in a mortar.
Make the marmalade
Combine the pounded rinds with the juice, pulp, and an equal weight of sugar in a preserving pan.
Boil the mixture for about 1 hour.
Let it cool before storing.
Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.
Explore the science
The flavor team
The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.
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Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together19,212 recipes
Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Orange and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Seville oranges
- Provide the bitter peel, pulp and juice that give marmalade its characteristic flavour and set.
- Sugar
- Sweetens the marmalade and helps it set and keep by binding water and thickening the mixture.
The step that matters
Boiling the rinds until tender. Rinds must be fully softened before the sugar is added, because sugar hardens the peel and stops it from becoming tender later. Changing the water removes bitterness that would otherwise stay in the finished marmalade.
“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.
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