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Tangerine Marmalade

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Tangerine and lemon work together. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 61 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Tangerine Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Put the tangerines whole into a preserving pan and add enough water to float them.

  2. Boil until soft, then remove the tangerines and let them cool.

  3. Cut the tangerines in half and remove the pulp.

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

  5. Boil the liquid for 15 minutes, then strain through a fine sieve and a cloth.

Make the marmalade

  1. Return the liquid to the preserving pan, add the sugar, and bring to a boil.

  2. Cut some of the peel into very thin strips and add to the liquid.

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

  4. Fill jars with the marmalade and 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. Tangerine + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together61 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

  3. Tangerine + sugartop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together112 recipes

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
Supply the fruit, peel and pectin-rich pulp that give the marmalade its flavor and body.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, with the boiling, helps it set into a jelly.
Lemons
Add acidity that supports pectin setting and brightens the flavor.

The step that matters

Boil until it jellies. Sugar and acid must be boiled to the point where pectin forms a gel. Too little boiling leaves a runny marmalade, while overboiling can darken and toughen the flavor.

Swap the tangerine

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, sugar. 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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