Skip to main content
Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from rhubarb, orange pulp, peel, lemon juice, sugar, and almonds.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Rhubarb and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 117 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Orange Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Combine rhubarb, orange pulp and juice, grated orange peel, lemon juice, and sugar in a bowl.

  2. Let the mixture stand until the sugar is dissolved.

Cook and seal

  1. Boil the mixture quickly until it becomes transparent.

  2. Add the blanched almonds and boil once more.

  3. Pour the marmalade into glasses and seal.

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. Rhubarb + almondtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together117 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Rhubarb + orangetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together299 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

  4. Orange + almondtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,125 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Rhubarb + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together546 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and helps it thicken and set as it cooks.
Rhubarb
Adds tart body and bulk to the marmalade.
Blanched almonds
Add texture and crunch to the finished marmalade.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture quickly until transparent. Sugar and fruit pectin set only at a high enough concentration and temperature. Boiling briefly and hard drives off water so the marmalade thickens; boiling too long can darken the flavour and make it overly stiff.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rhubarb, orange, sugar, almond):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Blueberryfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against rhubarb, orange, sugar, almond. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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 →

You might also like

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesRhubarb PieRhubarb Pie152 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipes