Name: Orange Marmalade
Ingredients: oranges; ¾ pound coarsely powdered loaf sugar; water

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

oranges
¾ pound coarsely powdered loaf sugar
water

Directions

Prepare the fruit

Cut the oranges into pieces and remove the pulp.
Squeeze the pulp through a sieve and measure the juice.
Boil the orange rind in water until soft.
Remove the white pulpy mass from the rind, leaving only the thin outer yellow rind.

Make the marmalade

For every pint of juice, add ¾ pound of sugar and the thinly sliced yellow rind.

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.

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

Oranges: Supply the juice and the rind, which provide the marmalade's bitterness and aroma.
Loaf sugar: Sweetens the marmalade and helps it set into a thick, spreadable texture.

“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.