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Dessert

Dundee Marmalade

A citrus marmalade made from oranges and lemons, sugar, and water, simmered until jellied.

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 ↓

Dundee Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Wash the oranges and lemons thoroughly.

  2. Slice each fruit crosswise into thin flakes.

  3. Discard the end pieces.

  4. Remove the seeds.

  5. Place the seeds in a bowl, covering them with warm water.

  6. Soak the sliced fruit in cold water for 36 hours.

Cook the marmalade

  1. Combine the sliced fruit, soaking water, and drained seed water in a preserving kettle.

  2. Simmer for 2 hours.

  3. Add warmed sugar.

  4. Boil until the mixture jellies, about 1 hour.

Jar

  1. Pour the marmalade into jelly glasses.

  2. Seal the glasses.

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 bitter peel and pulp that give marmalade its characteristic flavor and body.
Lemons
Add acidity and natural pectin that help the marmalade set.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, when boiled, helps it thicken and set into a gel.

The step that matters

Boil until the mixture jellies. Sugar and fruit pectin only form a gel at a sufficiently high concentration and temperature, so underboiling leaves the marmalade runny while overboiling can make it stiff and dull in colour.

“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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