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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserved citrus spread made from oranges, lemons, water, and 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. Wash the oranges and lemons thoroughly.

  2. Cut off the ends and slice the fruit very thin.

  3. Weigh the fruit and add 4 quarts of water for each pound of fruit.

Soak and cook the fruit

  1. Let the mixture stand for 12 hours.

  2. Cook until the fruit is tender enough to pierce easily with a toothpick.

  3. Transfer to bowls and let stand for another 12 hours.

Add sugar and set

  1. Weigh the fruit again and add 1¼ pounds of sugar for each pound of fruit.

  2. Put the mixture in a kettle and cook until the syrup jellies.

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

Navel oranges
Their peel and pulp supply pectin, bitterness and aroma that shape the marmalade's flavor and set.
Lemons
Their acidity and pectin help the syrup set into a gel and brighten the flavor.
Sugar
Provides sweetness and, at high concentration, preserves the fruit and helps the syrup gel.

The step that matters

Cook until the syrup jellies. Pectin only sets when enough sugar and acid are present and the syrup is concentrated. Stopping too early leaves a runny marmalade, while cooking too long makes it stiff and dark.

“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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