Skip to main content
Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A sweet preserve made from orange rind, pulp, juice, sugar, water, and apple liquor.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Orange and apple match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,230 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Orange Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Rasp the oranges and cut out the pulp.

  2. Boil the rinds until very tender, then beat them fine in a marble mortar.

Make the marmalade

  1. In a pot, boil the sugar in water and skim it.

  2. Add the rind to the syrup and boil fast until very thick, stirring carefully.

  3. Add the pulp, juice, and apple liquor, then boil gently until well jellied, about 30 minutes.

  4. Pour into small pots.

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 + appletop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Sugar + appletop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Sugar and apple barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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

Loaf sugar
Provides sweetness and, with the fruit pectin, helps the marmalade set into a gel.
Orange rind
Adds bitter aroma and body, and its pectin-rich peel helps the marmalade thicken.
Orange pulp and juice
Supplies acidity and liquid, and extra pectin to help the marmalade jell.
Apple liquor
Adds natural pectin and acidity to help the marmalade set.

The step that matters

Boiling until well jellied. The mixture must reach a high enough concentration of sugar and pectin with acid to set. Undercooking leaves it runny, while prolonged boiling can darken the flavour and dull the colour.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Apricotfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, apple. 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.

More orange marmalade recipes

Seville 44Pudding 17Clear 10Scotch 6Bitter 4 See all 487 →

You might also like

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesApple PuddingApple Pudding256 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipesOrange GelatinOrange Gelatin100 recipes