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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from oranges, lemons, water, and sugar.

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

  1. Slice the oranges and lemons into small pieces and mix them together.

  2. Add 14 cups of water and let the mixture stand for 24 hours.

Cook

  1. After 24 hours, boil the mixture for 30 minutes, then let it stand for another 24 hours.

  2. Measure the mixture and add 1½ cups of sugar for every cup of juice.

  3. Boil the mixture for 1 hour, or until it thickens on the spoon.

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

Oranges
Provide the main fruit flavour, bitterness from the peel, and natural pectin for setting.
Lemons
Add acidity that brightens the flavour and helps the marmalade set.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and helps it thicken and preserve.

The step that matters

Boil until it thickens on the spoon. Sugar and pectin only set when the mixture reaches the right concentration. Stopping too early leaves a runny marmalade, while boiling too long can make it stiff or darken the 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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