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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserved citrus spread made from bitter oranges, lemons, sugar, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Orange Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peel

  1. Wipe the oranges with a hard cloth.

  2. Thinly pare the yellow rind into slender chips.

  3. Boil the chips with 2 ½ cups of water slowly for 30 minutes in a small saucepan.

Extract the pulp and make the marmalade

  1. Remove the skin from the oranges.

  2. Break the pulp.

  3. Place the pulp in a jelly pan with 5 cups of water.

  4. Boil gently for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.

  5. Pour the liquid into a flannel bag to drain thoroughly.

  6. Combine the drained liquid, the chips, the liquid they were boiled in, and 5 lbs of sugar in a clean jelly pan.

  7. Stir and boil for 15 minutes.

  8. Skim off any foam.

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

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

  2. Bitter orange + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together21 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  3. Bitter orange + sugartop 41% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14 recipes

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

Bitter oranges
Supply the peel and pulp, which provide the bitterness, aroma and natural pectin that help the marmalade set.
Crystallized sugar
Provides sweetness and, at high concentration, helps the marmalade gel.
Water
Softens the peel and pulp and extracts their pectin during the long gentle boil.

The step that matters

Stir and boil for 15 minutes. Sugar, pectin and the acid in the fruit set into a gel only at a high enough concentration. Boiling too briefly leaves the marmalade runny, while boiling too long can darken it and dull the flavour. Stirring prevents the sugar from scorching on the bottom of the pan.

Swap the bitter orange

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

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Bitter orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against 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.

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