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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from Seville orange peel, juice, lemon juice, sugar, and water.

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 peel

  1. Score the peel of the oranges in quarters and remove it, keeping as much white pith as possible.

  2. Place the peel in a pot and cover with cold water, changing the water three times while boiling until tender.

  3. Drain the peel and cut it into very thin shreds.

Make the marmalade

  1. Squeeze the oranges and add the juice of four lemons for every dozen oranges.

  2. Weigh the shredded peel and juice, then combine with sugar to make the syrup.

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
Their peel and pith supply bitterness and natural pectin, which helps the marmalade set.
Lemons
Their juice adds acidity that brightens flavour and supports pectin setting.
Sugar
Adds sweetness, helps the marmalade set and preserves it.

The step that matters

Soften the peel fully before adding sugar. Sugar hardens the peel and stops it softening, so the shreds must be tender after boiling. Adding sugar too early leaves the peel tough and chewy in the finished marmalade.

“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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