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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from sliced oranges and lemons steeped in water and sweetened with sugar.

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

  1. Soak the sliced oranges and lemons in 3 quarts of water for 24 hours.

Cook

  1. After soaking, cook the mixture for 10 minutes and let it stand for another 24 hours.

  2. Add 3 quarts of granulated sugar and cook until it jells.

  3. Do not pour off any of the water at any time.

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
Supply the bitter peel and pulp that give marmalade its characteristic flavor and pectin.
Lemons
Add extra acidity and pectin, helping the mixture set.
Granulated sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, when cooked, helps it thicken and set into a gel.

The step that matters

Cook until it jells. Sugar must be added and cooked until the mixture reaches the gel point. Undercooking leaves marmalade runny, while overcooking can make it stiff and dark. The citrus pectin and acid are what allow the set.

“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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