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Dessert

Clear Orange Marmalade

A clear marmalade made from Seville orange pulp, juice, rinds, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Clear Orange Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Wash and wipe the orange rinds clean.

  2. Boil the rinds in a large quantity of water until tender.

  3. Drain the rinds.

  4. Scrape off the white skin and fibers while still warm.

  5. Pound the rinds to a paste.

  6. Blend the paste with the pulp and juice gradually to avoid lumps.

  7. Add ¼ cup of water that has soaked the seeds for 1-2 hours.

  8. Strain the mixture through a coarse sieve.

Cook and set

  1. Boil the mixture without sugar for 20-30 minutes.

  2. Add half of the sugar.

  3. Boil for 10-15 minutes.

  4. Add the remaining sugar.

  5. Boil for another 15-20 minutes until thick and clear.

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 orange pulp and juice
Provides the bulk of the fruit flavour and natural pectin that helps the marmalade set.
Orange rinds
Supply bitterness and aromatic oils, plus more pectin, giving marmalade its characteristic flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, at high concentration, helps it gel and keeps it preserved.
Water strained from pips
Carries extra pectin from the seeds into the mixture to aid setting.

The step that matters

Adding the sugar in two portions. Sugar added too early or in one large amount can toughen the rind and slow setting. Adding it in portions after the pectin has been extracted lets the mixture reach the sugar concentration and temperature needed to gel.

“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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