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Dessert

Seville Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from Seville oranges, lemons, and sugar, simmered until thick and jelly-like.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

Seville Orange Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Cut the rinds of the oranges and lemons deeply enough to strip them off in quarters.

  2. Soak the rinds in cold water overnight.

  3. Boil the rinds until tender, then drain and cool them.

  4. Scrape out the white part of the rind and cut the remainder into thin chips.

  5. Remove the pips and film from the fruit pulp.

Make the marmalade

  1. Combine the pulp and rind chips in a preserving pan and heat slowly.

  2. Boil for 10 minutes, then stir in the sugar until dissolved.

  3. Boil quickly for 20 minutes or until the mixture thickens and resembles jelly.

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 and pulp that give marmalade its characteristic flavour and pectin.
Lemons
Add extra acidity and pectin to help the marmalade set.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, at high concentration, helps it set into a gel.

The step that matters

Boil quickly until the mixture thickens. Sugar must dissolve fully before the fast boil, and the mixture must reach a high enough sugar and pectin concentration to gel. Undercooking leaves it runny; overcooking can darken and toughen the flavour.

“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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