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Dessert

Lemon Marmalade

A preserved lemon spread made by boiling lemons with sugar and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Lemon Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lemons

  1. Boil the lemons in water for about 2 hours, changing the water 2-3 times.

  2. Drain the lemons and keep the last boiling water.

  3. Cut the lemons in half and slice them finely, removing all the seeds.

Make the marmalade

  1. Combine 3 pints of lemon water and sugar in a pot.

  2. Boil for 15 minutes, removing the scum.

  3. Add the sliced lemons and boil until clear.

  4. Strain the fruit when cold.

  5. Boil the syrup again.

  6. Add the fruit.

  7. Boil once more.

  8. Pour into jars, let cool, and cover.

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

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

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

Lemons
Provide the bitter peel and pulp that give marmalade its characteristic flavour and set.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, when boiled, thickens the syrup so it sets as it cools.

The step that matters

Boil the lemons until tender before adding sugar. The peel must soften fully in long boiling, because sugar hardens the peel and stops it from becoming tender later. Changing the water removes excess bitterness.

“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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