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Dessert

Oranqb Marmalade

A preserve made from Seville oranges, lemon juice and rind, sweet orange juice, sugar, and water, boiled until clear.

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 ↓

Oranqb Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the peel

  1. Place the Seville oranges in a pan and cover them with water.

  2. Boil gently for 3 hours.

  3. Remove the oranges from the water and let them cool slightly.

  4. Cut them into very thin strips, removing the seeds.

Make the marmalade

  1. For every pound of fruit, add 2 pounds of sugar and ½ cup of the water used for boiling the oranges.

  2. Dissolve the sugar in the water.

  3. Add the fruit, rind, and juice of the lemons, and the juice of the sweet oranges.

  4. Boil for 45 minutes until clear.

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 for flavour and natural pectin that helps the marmalade set.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, with heat and acid, helps it set into a gel.
Lemons
Add acidity and extra pectin, which help the marmalade set and brighten the flavour.
Sweet oranges
Add juice for sweetness and moisture, balancing the bitterness of the Seville oranges.

The step that matters

Final boil until clear. Pectin, sugar and acid form a gel only at a sufficient concentration and temperature. Boiling too briefly leaves the marmalade runny, while boiling too long can darken it and make it 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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