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Dessert

Clear Orange Marmalade

A clear marmalade made from Seville oranges, their rinds, pulp, juice, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Orange and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,212 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Clear Orange Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Wash and wipe the orange rinds clean.

  2. Boil the rinds in a large quantity of water until tender.

  3. Drain the rinds on a sieve and scrape off the white skin and fibers while warm.

  4. Pound the rinds to a paste.

  5. Blend the paste with the pulp and juice gradually to avoid lumps.

  6. Soak the seeds in ½ cup of water for 1-2 hours.

  7. Mix the soaked water into the paste.

Cook the marmalade

  1. Boil the mixture without sugar for 15-20 minutes.

  2. Add half of the sugar and boil for 10-15 minutes.

  3. Add the remaining sugar and boil for another 15-20 minutes until thick and clear.

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 + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

Orange and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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 the bitter peel, pulp and pectin that give marmalade its set and characteristic flavor.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, at high concentration, helps it set and keep.
Orange rinds
Supply the peel that becomes tender, giving texture and bitter flavor to the finished marmalade.

The step that matters

Adding the sugar in portions. Sugar added too early, or in one large amount, can toughen the peel and slow setting. Boiling the fruit first softens the peel, and sugar added in stages lets the mixture thicken gradually without scorching.

“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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