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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from sliced Seville oranges, lemon, water, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Orange Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Slice the oranges and lemon very thin, removing the seeds.

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

Cook and set

  1. Boil the mixture until the chips are perfectly tender.

  2. Allow the pulp to stand until the next day, then weigh it.

  3. For every pound of pulp, add 1.5 lbs of loaf sugar.

  4. Boil until the syrup jellies and the chips are transparent, which will take nearly an hour.

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 + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

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

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

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

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

Seville oranges
Provide the bitter peel and pectin that give marmalade its characteristic flavour and set.
Lemon
Adds extra acidity and pectin, helping the marmalade set.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, as it dissolves and concentrates, helps the syrup gel.

The step that matters

Boil until the syrup jellies. Marmalade sets when sugar, pectin and acid reach the right concentration. Stopping too early leaves a runny preserve, while overcooking can make it dark and stiff.

“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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