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Dessert

Lemon Marmalade

A preserved lemon fruit spread made by boiling lemons with water and sugar, then cooling and jarred.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Lemon Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lemons

  1. Scrub and wash the lemons.

  2. Place them in a saucepan. Cover with cold water.

  3. Boil for 1 hour until tender.

  4. Change the water twice with boiling water.

  5. Remove the lemons.

  6. Pour the cooking water into a basin.

Cut the lemons

  1. Cut the lemons into quarters. Remove the center pith and seeds.

  2. Cut the remaining lemon into fine chips.

  3. Weigh the pulp and chips.

Make the marmalade

  1. For every pound, add 1 pint of the reserved water and 2 lbs of sugar.

  2. In a preserving pan, combine the sugar and water. Boil for 15 minutes while stirring and skimming off the scum.

  3. Allow the syrup to cool slightly before adding the pulp and chips.

  4. Boil gently for about 1 hour until it jellies.

Jar

  1. Pour into warm, dry jars. Cover immediately.

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. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

Lemons
Their pulp and chips supply the bitter peel, pectin and tart flavor that give the marmalade its character.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, when boiled down, helps the mixture thicken and set.
Water from cooking lemons
Dilutes the sugar into a syrup and carries pectin from the lemons into the mixture.

The step that matters

Boil gently until it jellies. Setting depends on pectin, acid and sugar reaching the right concentration. Too little cooking leaves the marmalade runny, while overcooking can make it stiff and dark.

“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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