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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from Seville oranges, sugar, water, lemon juice, and grated rind, boiled until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Orange Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Peel the oranges, removing some of the white pith.

  2. Boil the rinds in water for 2 hours, changing the water three times to reduce bitterness.

  3. Break the pulp into small pieces, remove all the seeds, and cut the boiled rind into chips.

Make the marmalade

  1. Make a syrup by boiling the sugar and water until clear, then skim off any foam.

  2. Add the pulp, chips, lemon juice, and grated rind to the syrup.

  3. Boil everything together for 20 minutes to 1 hour, skimming off any scum.

Pot and cover

  1. Pour the marmalade into pots and let it cool.

  2. Cover with bladders or tissue paper brushed with egg white.

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. Sugar + lemontop 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).

Sugar and lemon 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 pectin, bitterness and aromatic peel that give marmalade its character.
Fine loaf sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, as it concentrates, helps it set and keep.
Water
Extracts flavour from the rinds and dissolves the sugar into a syrup.
Lemons
Add acidity and extra pectin, which help the marmalade set.

The step that matters

Boil the rinds until tender before adding sugar. Citrus rind softens slowly, and sugar hardens it and slows softening. Cooking the rinds fully first gives tender chips and a marmalade that sets evenly.

“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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