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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from sliced oranges, water, and sugar, simmered until tender.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,212 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Orange Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the oranges into thin slices, including the rind, avoiding seeds and core.

  2. Soak the orange slices in cold water for 24 hours.

Make the marmalade

  1. Boil the soaked oranges in the same water for 3 hours.

  2. Add the sugar and cook slowly until tender, about 4 hours.

Jar

  1. Pour into jars and cover once cooled.

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 + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Orange and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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
Rind and pith supply natural pectin and bitterness that help the marmalade set and flavour it.
Sugar
Sweetness and preservation, and with cooking it concentrates the mixture so it sets to a gel.

The step that matters

Cook slowly after adding the sugar. Sugar must dissolve fully and the mixture must reach a thick concentration to set into a gel. Cooking too hard or too long can scorch the sugar, darken the flavour and make the texture stiff.

“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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