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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from bitter and sweet oranges, water, sugar, and lemon juice, boiled until jelly consistency.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Orange Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Slice the bitter and sweet oranges very thin, removing the seeds from the sweet oranges.

  2. Soak the sliced oranges in 1 pint of water for 34 hours.

Make the marmalade

  1. Add the remaining 9 pints of water to the soaked oranges and boil until the fruit is clear and falls to the bottom of the pot.

  2. Add the sugar and boil until it reaches a jelly consistency.

  3. Remove from heat, stir in the lemon juice, and let cool before bottling.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

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.

  1. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Bitter orange + orangetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together23 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetal (cream, earthy).

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Bitter orange + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together21 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Bitter oranges
Their peel and pectin give the marmalade its bitter flavour and help it set.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, when boiled, helps it thicken to a jelly consistency.
Sweet oranges
Add sweetness and citrus flavour to balance the bitter oranges.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and supports the set.

The step that matters

Boil until the jelly consistency is reached. Sugar must be boiled to a high enough concentration for the pectin and acid in the fruit to gel as it cools. Stopping too early leaves a runny marmalade, while boiling too long can make it stiff and dark.

Swap the bitter orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (orange, sugar, lemon):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Bitter orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, sugar, lemon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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