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Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from oranges, lemons, and sugar equal to the fruit's weight.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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. Boil the oranges and lemons in water for 2 to 3 hours.

  2. Discard the water.

  3. Open the fruits, removing the seeds while preserving all the pulp and juice.

  4. Cut the rinds into small strips or chop them; cutting into strips is preferred.

  5. Weigh the combined fruit.

Add the sugar

  1. Use an equal weight of sugar.

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

Oranges
Supply the bitter peel, pulp and juice that give marmalade its characteristic flavor and body.
Lemons
Add acidity and natural pectin, helping the marmalade set.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, at high concentration, helps it set and keep.

The step that matters

Weigh the combined fruit before adding sugar. The sugar must equal the fruit's combined weight, so an inaccurate weight shifts the sweetness and the balance needed for setting.

“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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