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Mohren 2Iaiynelacle — Carrot Marmalade

A sweet preserve of carrots, lemon peel, sugar, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,351 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Mohren 2Iaiynelacle — Carrot Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the carrots and lemons

  1. Boil the carrots until soft enough to pierce with a pin.

  2. Peel the lemons thinly and boil the peelings in a small amount of water until softened.

  3. Cut the carrots into thin slices and then into narrow strips.

  4. Cut the lemon peel into very thin strips.

Make the marmalade

  1. Moisten the sugar with the water from the boiled lemon peels and boil until beads form.

  2. Add the carrot strips and lemon peel to the sugar.

  3. Strain in the clear juice of the lemons.

  4. Boil gently until the mixture thickens.

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. Carrot + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,351 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Carrot + sugartop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,211 recipes

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

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

Carrots
Provide the bulk and body of the marmalade, with a soft, sliceable texture once cooked.
Lump sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, when boiled, thickens it into a set preserve.
Lemons
Add acidity and aroma, and their peel supplies bitter flavour and pectin for setting.

The step that matters

Boil gently until the mixture thickens. Sugar concentrates as water evaporates, and the set depends on reaching a high enough sugar concentration with pectin and acid. Boiling too hard or too long can darken and over-thicken the mixture, while stopping too early leaves it runny.

Swap the carrot

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Kalefits better
  4. Carrotthe 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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