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Dessert

Lemon Marmalade

A preserve made from lemon pulp, rind, seeds, sugar, and water, boiled until set.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Lemon Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lemons

  1. Peel thin strips of the yellow rind from the lemons and set aside.

  2. Carefully peel and remove all fibrous parts from the lemons, collecting the seeds in a thin cloth.

Cook and test

  1. Add the lemon pulp, rind strips, and the bag of seeds to a preserving kettle with water and sugar.

  2. Keep the kettle uncovered and let the mixture boil gently.

  3. Drop a spoonful onto a chilled plate. If it sets, the marmalade is ready.

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. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

Lemons
Provide the rind and pulp that give the marmalade its bitter-tart flavour and body.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, as it concentrates, helps it thicken and set.
Lemon seeds
Release natural pectin into the cooking liquid, which helps the marmalade set.

The step that matters

Testing for set with a chilled plate. Marmalade sets because pectin and sugar concentrate as water evaporates during boiling. Testing on a cold plate shows whether the mixture will gel as it cools, so overcooking or undercooking is avoided.

“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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