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Tangerine Marmalade

A preserve made from tangerines, lemons, water, and sugar, cooked until jellied.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange 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 ↓

Tangerine Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the fruit

  1. Put the tangerines whole into a preserving pan.

  2. Add enough water to float them.

  3. Boil until soft.

  4. Remove the tangerines.

  5. Let them cool.

  6. Cut the tangerines in half.

  7. Remove the pulp.

  8. Put the pulp into the water used for boiling, using 1 quart for each pound of tangerines.

  9. Boil for 15 minutes.

  10. Strain the liquid through a fine sieve and cloth.

Make the marmalade

  1. Return the liquid to the pan.

  2. Add sugar.

  3. Bring to a boil.

  4. Cut some peel into thin strips.

  5. Add the peel strips to the liquid.

  6. Boil for about 30 minutes or until it jellies.

Jar and store

  1. Fill jars.

  2. Cover once cooled.

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 + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Tangerine + orangetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together103 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  3. Tangerine + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together61 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

  5. Sugar + orangetop 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

Tangerines
Provide the fruit, peel and pulp that supply the marmalade's flavour and pectin for setting.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, when boiled down, helps it set into a jelly.
Lemons
Add acidity that brightens flavour and supports pectin setting.

The step that matters

Boil until it jellies. Sugar and pectin set only at a high enough concentration, so the liquid must reach setting point. Stopping too early leaves a runny marmalade, while boiling too long can darken and stiffen it.

Swap the tangerine

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, sugar, orange):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Tangerinethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, sugar, orange. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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