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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from Seville oranges, sugar, and water, simmered until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 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 ↓

Orange Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Weigh the sugar and oranges.

  2. Score the skin of the oranges and remove it in quarters.

  3. Boil the quarters in a muslin bag in water until soft and easily pierced.

  4. Cut the rind into chips about 1 inch long and as thin as possible, removing any excess white pulp.

  5. Split open the oranges, scrape out the pulp and juice, discarding the white pith and seeds.

Make the marmalade

  1. Make a syrup by boiling the sugar and water until clear.

  2. Add the chips, pulp, and juice.

  3. Boil the marmalade for 20 minutes to ½ hour, removing any scum that rises.

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
Provide the bitter peel and pectin-rich pulp that give marmalade its flavour and set.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and helps it set as the syrup thickens.

The step that matters

Boiling the marmalade. Boil long enough for the syrup to reach setting point, since too little boiling leaves it runny. Removing scum keeps the finished marmalade clear and clean-tasting.

“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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