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Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from Seville oranges, sugar, water, and lemon juice and rind.

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 it.

  2. Add the pulp and chips to the syrup and boil for 20 minutes to 1 hour.

  3. For improved flavor, add the juice and grated rind of 2 lemons with the pulp and chips.

Pot and seal

  1. Pour into pots and 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 pulp, peel and pectin that give marmalade its body and bitter flavor.
Fine loaf sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and helps it set into a thick, spreadable gel.
Lemons
Add acidity and extra pectin to support setting and brighten the flavor.

The step that matters

Boil the rinds for 2 hours, changing the water three times. Changing the water draws out bitter compounds from the peel, so the finished marmalade is not overly bitter. Skipping the changes leaves a harsher flavor.

“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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