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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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. Remove all seeds from the oranges and lemons, then shred the fruit very finely.

  2. Add 3.5 pints of water to the shredded fruit.

  3. Boil for 30 minutes.

  4. Set the mixture aside until the following day.

Make the marmalade

  1. For each pint of the mixture, add 1 pint of granulated sugar.

  2. Boil rapidly until the mixture 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. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. 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

Oranges
Provide the bulk of the flavour and the pectin-rich peel and pith that help the marmalade set.
Lemons
Add extra acidity and natural pectin, which helps the marmalade gel.
Granulated sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, with acid and pectin, helps it set into a gel.

The step that matters

Boil rapidly until the mixture begins to jelly. Sugar must be added to a cooked, softened fruit mixture and boiled hard so it reaches the concentration and acidity needed for pectin to set. Undercooking leaves a runny marmalade, while overcooking darkens and toughens it.

“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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