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Dessert

Genuine Scotch Marmalade

A marmalade made from bitter oranges, sugar, and water, steeped and boiled until jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Bitter orange and sugar work together. They rank in the top 41% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14 recipes. The science ↓

Genuine Scotch Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Cut the rind of the oranges into quarters and peel it off, removing some of the spongy white skin if a thinner marmalade is desired.

  2. Cut the rind into thin chips, about half an inch long, and divide the pulp into small bits, removing the seeds.

  3. Place the chips and pulp in a deep dish and pour boiling water over them; let sit for 12 to 14 hours.

Make the marmalade

  1. Steep the seeds in part of the water (3 quarts total) for the marmalade.

  2. Transfer the mixture to a preserving pan and boil until the chips are tender.

  3. Gradually add the pounded sugar and boil until the marmalade jellies.

  4. Strain the water from the seeds through a sieve.

  5. Working the seeds with a spoon to extract a clear jelly.

  6. Add this to the fruit mixture when it first goes on the fire.

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. Bitter orange + sugartop 41% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14 recipes

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Bitter oranges
Provide the bitter peel and pulp that give marmalade its characteristic flavor and body.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, with the fruit's pectin, helps it set into a jelly.
Water
Extracts flavor and softens the chips and pulp before the marmalade is boiled.

The step that matters

Gradually add the pounded sugar and boil until the marmalade jellies. Sugar must be added gradually so it dissolves fully without crystallizing, and the mixture must reach a boil hot enough for pectin and acid to set the jelly.

“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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