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Dessert

Marmalade

A sweet preserve made from Seville orange rinds, pulp, juice, and sugar.

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 ↓

Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the rinds from the Seville oranges and pound them to a paste.

Make the marmalade

  1. Boil the rinds with the pulp and juice for 10 minutes.

  2. Add the sugar and stir until dissolved.

  3. Continue to boil until the mixture thickens into a syrup.

Jar

  1. Pour into jars and seal.

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
Supply the bitter peel and pectin that give marmalade its characteristic flavour and set.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, as it concentrates, helps the mixture thicken into a set syrup.

The step that matters

Continue to boil until the mixture thickens into a syrup. Sugar and pectin only set properly when the mixture reaches a high enough concentration. Stopping too early leaves a runny marmalade, while boiling too long can make it overly thick and dull in flavour.

“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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