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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from Seville and sweet oranges, sugar, water, and ginger, simmered until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,833 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Orange Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rinds

  1. Remove the rind of the Seville oranges in 2 to 4 parts.

  2. Boil the rinds in enough water to cover them until tender.

  3. Drain the rinds and scrape away the white inner part.

  4. Cut the Seville rinds into thin strips and weigh them.

Make the marmalade

  1. Mix the juice and pulp of the Seville and sweet oranges, ensuring to remove the seeds.

  2. For each pound of this mixture, add ½ pint of water and boil for 2 hours, adding more water as needed.

  3. Pass the mixture through a jelly bag.

  4. For each pound of rinds, add an equal weight of sugar to the strained pulp and dissolve.

  5. Add the strips of rind to the mixture and simmer until thick.

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 + gingertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,833 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  2. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

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

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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
Their rind and pulp supply the bitter flavour and natural pectin that help the marmalade set.
Sweet oranges
Add juice and body, mellowing the bitterness of the Seville oranges.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, when boiled down, helps it thicken and set.

The step that matters

Simmering until thick. Sugar and pectin only gel once enough water has evaporated and the mixture reaches a high enough concentration. Stopping too early leaves a runny marmalade, while overcooking can make it dark and bitter.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Lemonfits about as well
  2. Orangethe original
  3. Limefits about as well
  4. Vanillafits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, ginger. 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 →

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