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Marmalade

A preserved orange peel and juice marmalade made with sugar and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peel

  1. Place the orange peel in a preserving kettle and cover with fresh cold water. Boil for 1 hour.

  2. Change the water and continue boiling until the peel is tender enough to pierce with a straw.

  3. Drain the water and cut the peel into fine shreds.

Make the marmalade

  1. Squeeze the oranges and mix the juice with the juice of 4 lemons.

  2. Weigh the shredded peel and juice. For every pound, use 1.5 pounds of lump sugar.

  3. Add 1 pint of water for each pound of sugar and boil for 15 minutes.

  4. Add the fruit juice and boil until the syrup thickens.

  5. Stir in the peel and boil for 20 minutes or until the marmalade jellies.

Jar

  1. Pour into jars and let them sit uncovered for 1-2 days before sealing.

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

Orange peel
Supplies the bitter flavor and the shreds that give marmalade its texture.
Lump sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and helps it set into a firm jelly as it thickens.
Orange juice
Adds liquid and citrus flavor, and its natural pectin helps the marmalade jell.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and supports pectin setting.

The step that matters

Boil the peel until tender before adding sugar. Peel that is not fully softened stays tough, because sugar hardens the peel's tissue and stops it softening later. Tender peel gives a pleasant texture in the finished marmalade.

“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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