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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

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

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 sweet oranges and lemons very thin.

  2. Boil the sliced sweet oranges and lemons in 1 pint of water for 30 minutes.

  3. Cut the bitter oranges into large pieces and boil in the remaining 2 pints of water for 30 minutes.

Make the marmalade

  1. Strain the mixture through a colander and combine with the sweet oranges and lemons.

  2. For every pound of pulp, add 1 pound of sugar and boil for 40 minutes, or until it begins to jelly.

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. Orange + bitter orangetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together23 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetal (cream, earthy).

  3. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + bitter orangetop 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).

Lemon and sugar 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
Provide the pectin and bitter peel that help the marmalade set and give its characteristic flavor.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and helps it set into a jelly as it cooks.
Sweet oranges
Add sweetness, body and citrus aroma from the sliced peel and pulp.
Lemons
Add acidity and natural pectin that support setting and brighten the flavor.

The step that matters

Boiling until it begins to jelly. Sugar and pectin set only at a sufficient concentration; boiling too briefly leaves the marmalade runny, while overcooking can make it stiff and dull in flavor.

Swap the bitter orange

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, lemon, sugar. 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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