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Dessert

Scotch Orange Marmalade

A marmalade made from Seville oranges, water, and sugar, boiled until the fruit is tender and the syrup thickens.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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 ↓

Scotch Orange Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Cut the oranges in half and squeeze out the juice; set the juice aside.

  2. Chop the fruit, rind included, discarding the seeds.

  3. In a large bowl, combine the chopped fruit with 1 gallon of water and let it stand for 24 hours.

Boil and set aside

  1. Boil the mixture until tender, adding more water if it gets too thick, then set aside until the next day.

Make the marmalade

  1. Weigh the fruit and add the reserved juice.

  2. For every pound of boiled fruit, add 1.5 pounds of white sugar.

  3. Boil until the chips are transparent and the syrup jellies, which may take an hour or more.

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 + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked 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
Their rind and pectin-rich pulp give the marmalade its bitter flavor and natural set.
White sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and helps the syrup thicken and set as it cooks.

The step that matters

Boil until the syrup jellies. Sugar and pectin only set at a high enough concentration, so the cook must boil until the syrup gels, not just until the peel is soft. Undercooked marmalade stays runny; overcooked marmalade becomes stiff and can darken.

“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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