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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from Seville orange skins and fruit, sweetened with equal weight of sugar.

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 oranges

  1. Score the peel of the oranges with a sharp knife and remove it in quarters, avoiding the inner fruit.

  2. Boil the skins until tender enough to pierce with a pin.

  3. Scrape off the tough white pulp.

  4. Divide the fruit into sections, removing the seeds.

  5. Scrape out the white spongy part.

  6. Cut the skins into thin chips about an inch long.

Make the marmalade

  1. Clarify the sugar.

  2. Add the chips and fruit to the boiling sugar.

  3. Boil quickly for twenty minutes.

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
Supply the peel for texture and the fruit for their natural pectin and bitter flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and helps it set as it thickens.

The step that matters

Boil quickly for twenty minutes. Boiling rapidly concentrates the sugar and pectin so the marmalade can gel. Too little heat or time leaves it runny, while overcooking can make it dark and bitter.

“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.

More orange marmalade recipes

Seville 44Pudding 17Clear 10Scotch 6Bitter 4 See all 487 →

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