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Dessert

Hip Marmalade

A marmalade made from hibiscus hips, sugar, water, and preserved ginger.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and ginger are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,054 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Hip Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut off the tops of the hips.

  2. In a saucepan, combine ½ cup of lump sugar with a small quantity of water and boil.

Make the marmalade

  1. Add the hips to the saucepan and boil until it becomes a smooth thick mass, stirring continuously with a wooden spoon.

  2. Cut preserved ginger into small pieces and mix it in at the end.

Jar and seal

  1. Turn the marmalade into jars, let it cool, then cover and seal.

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. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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

Hips
Provide the main body and pectin that thicken the marmalade into a smooth mass.
Lump sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and helps it set into a thick, spreadable texture.
Preserved ginger
Adds spicy aroma and a bit of chewy texture to the finished marmalade.

The step that matters

Stirring while the hips boil down. Constant stirring keeps the fruit from sticking and scorching on the bottom of the pan as it thickens. Scorched sugar gives a burnt flavour, and the mass must cook evenly to reach a smooth, thick set.

“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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