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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from Seville orange skins and fruit, boiled with equal parts sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 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 the peel

  1. Score the peel of the oranges with a sharp knife.

  2. Remove the peel in quarters, avoiding the inner fruit.

  3. Boil the skins until tender enough to pierce with a pin.

  4. Scrape off the tough white pulp from the skins.

  5. Cut the skins into thin chips about 1 inch long.

Prepare the fruit

  1. Divide the fruit into segments.

  2. Remove the seeds.

  3. Scrape out the white spongy part.

Make the marmalade

  1. Clarify the sugar.

  2. Add the chips and fruit to the boiling sugar.

  3. Boil quickly 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 + 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

Seville oranges
Supply the bitter peel, pectin-rich pith and fruit that give marmalade its flavour and set.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, at high concentration, helps it set and preserves it.

The step that matters

Boil quickly for 20 minutes. Rapid boiling evaporates water and concentrates the sugar and pectin so the marmalade reaches a set. Boiling too gently can leave it runny, and overcooking can darken and stiffen it.

“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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