Skip to main content
Dessert

Marmalade, Orange

A preserved citrus spread made from sliced Seville oranges, lemons, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Marmalade, Orange

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Slice the oranges and lemons thinly, removing the inner pith and seeds.

  2. Weigh the fruit and add 3 pints (12 cups) of cold water for each pound of fruit.

  3. Cover and let it sit in an earthenware vessel for 3 days.

Make the marmalade

  1. Transfer to a preserving pan and boil gently until tender.

  2. Let it cool, weigh again, and add 1 pound of sugar for each pound of fruit.

  3. Bring to a boil, skim well, and cook gently until the syrup thickens on a cold plate.

Pot and store

  1. Pour into pots, cover with paper brushed with egg white, and store in a cool, dry place.

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 natural pectin and acidity for setting, plus the characteristic bitter flavour.
Lemons
Add extra acidity and pectin to help the marmalade set.
Preserving sugar
Sweetens the marmalade, helps it set and preserves it for storage.

The step that matters

Testing the set on a cold plate. Pectin and sugar only gel properly at the right concentration. Stopping too early leaves the marmalade runny, while cooking too long makes it stiff and dull. A cold plate shows whether the syrup wrinkles when pushed, which signals it is ready.

“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 →

You might also like

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipes