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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from Seville oranges, lemons, apple juice, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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. Place the oranges and lemons in a pot and cover with water.

  2. Boil until the skins are tender.

  3. Cut the fruits into quarters.

  4. Remove the white part from the skins.

  5. Boil the pulp with the reserved water for 10 minutes.

  6. Strain the pulp through a jelly bag.

Make the apple juice

  1. Boil the apples to make ½ pint of apple juice.

  2. Strain the apple juice.

Cook the marmalade

  1. Combine the orange juice, apple juice, 2½ pounds of sugar, and minced rinds in a pan.

  2. Boil for 20-30 minutes.

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. Orange + appletop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

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

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

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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
Supply the bitter peel, pulp and juice that give marmalade its characteristic flavour and pectin.
Lemons
Add extra acidity and pectin to help the marmalade set.
Apple juice
Adds natural pectin and extra liquid to help the marmalade set.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, as it concentrates, helps it set and preserves it.

The step that matters

Boiling the marmalade to a set. Boiling must be long enough to concentrate the sugar and pectin so the mixture gels when cooled. Under-boiling leaves it runny, while over-boiling can darken and toughen the flavour.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Limefits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, lemon, sugar. 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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