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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from sliced oranges, lemon, 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

Soak and boil

  1. Slice the fruit very thin and let it stand overnight in 3 quarts of water.

  2. In the morning, boil the mixture for 45 minutes, then let it stand overnight again.

Add sugar and jar

  1. The next morning, boil again for 45 minutes or longer with 1½ lbs of sugar for each pound of fruit.

  2. Pour into jelly 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 peel and pith, rich in pectin that helps the marmalade set.
Lemon
Adds acidity that helps pectin set and brightens the flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, with pectin and acid, helps the mixture gel.

The step that matters

Boil again with the sugar. Sugar and pectin only gel when the mixture is concentrated and hot enough. Undercooked marmalade stays runny, while overcooking darkens it and makes it stiff and bitter.

“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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