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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserved citrus spread made from Seville oranges, sweet oranges, lemons, water, and crushed 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

  1. Slice the oranges and lemons as finely as possible.

  2. Place the sliced fruit in a deep dish with 1½ quarts of water and let it stand for 36 hours.

Cook

  1. Boil the mixture for 2 hours, adding more water if necessary.

  2. Add 4 pounds of crushed sugar and boil for an additional 2 hours, or until it reaches a jelly‑like consistency.

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
Provide the bitter peel and pectin that give marmalade its characteristic flavor and set.
Lemons
Add acidity and extra pectin to help the marmalade set.
Crushed sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, with the fruit's pectin and acid, helps it set into a jelly.

The step that matters

Boil until jelly-like consistency. Sugar must be boiled with the fruit until the pectin and acid cause the mixture to gel. Stopping too early leaves a runny marmalade, while overcooking can make 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.

More orange marmalade recipes

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

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