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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from bitter orange peels, pulp, juice, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Bitter orange and orange work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 23 recipes. Both carry acetal, which smells cream, earthy. The science ↓

Orange Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peels

  1. Pare off the yellow skins of the oranges, minimizing the white skin beneath.

  2. Cut the peels into small strips.

  3. Cut the strips again into smaller pieces.

  4. Place the peels in a pan and cover with water.

  5. Boil until the peels are soft.

  6. Strain the water through a sieve and set the peels aside.

Prepare the pulp

  1. Quarter the oranges.

  2. Scrape out the pulp and juice into a dish, discarding the white skins, films, and seeds.

Make the marmalade

  1. Combine the pulp, juice, and peels in the pan with the sugar.

  2. Stir until the mixture boils.

  3. Boil for 30 minutes.

  4. Skim thoroughly.

  5. Pour the marmalade into jars.

  6. Once cool, cover the jars and set aside for use.

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. Bitter orange + orangetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together23 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetal (cream, earthy).

  2. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Bitter orange + sugartop 41% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14 recipes

Sugar and orange 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

Bitter oranges
Provide the peel, pulp and juice, with pectin and sharp acidity that give marmalade its flavour and set.
Lump sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, as it boils, helps the mixture thicken and set.

The step that matters

Boiling the peels until soft. Peel must be fully tender before the sugar is added, because sugar hardens the peel and stops it softening later. Undercooked peel stays tough and chewy in the finished marmalade.

Swap the bitter orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, orange):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Bitter orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, orange. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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