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Orange Marmalade

A marmalade made from Seville oranges, water, and sugar, boiled until it jellies.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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 ↓

Orange Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Cut Seville oranges in half and slice them very thin, removing the seeds.

  2. Add 3 pints of cold water for each pound of fruit and let it stand for 24 hours.

Cook and set

  1. Boil the mixture until the oranges are tender.

  2. Let it stand again for 24 hours, then weigh the fruit.

  3. Add 1.5 lbs of sugar for every pound of boiled fruit.

  4. Boil the mixture for an hour or more, stirring constantly until the syrup jellies on a plate.

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 fruit pulp, peel and pectin that give marmalade its bitter flavour and set.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, with boiling, helps the syrup thicken and set.
Cold water
Softens the sliced fruit and draws out pectin and flavour during the long soak.

The step that matters

Boil until the syrup jellies on a plate. Setting depends on reaching the right sugar concentration and pectin level. Undercooking leaves marmalade runny, while overcooking can darken and toughen it. A cold plate test shows when the syrup is ready.

“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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