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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

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

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 ↓

Orange Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Boil the whole oranges and lemons in water for 5 hours.

  2. Scoop out the insides, removing the seeds.

  3. Cut the peel into thin slices.

Make the marmalade

  1. For every pound of pulp and peel, add 2 cups of water and 2 pounds of sugar.

  2. Boil for 20 minutes.

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

Seville oranges
Their bitter peel and high pectin give the marmalade its flavour and help it set.
Common oranges
Add sweet juice and pulp that give body to the marmalade.
Lemons
Their acidity and pectin help the marmalade set and balance the sweetness.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, when boiled, helps it set and keep.

The step that matters

Boil for 20 minutes. Boiling concentrates the sugar and pectin in the pulp and peel. This lets the marmalade set as it cools. Too short a boil leaves it runny, and boiling too long can darken it and make it taste 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.

More orange marmalade recipes

Seville 44Pudding 17Clear 10Scotch 6Bitter 4 See all 487 →

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