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Orange Marmalade

A preserved citrus spread made by boiling oranges and lemons with water 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 lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Orange Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Slice the oranges and lemons thinly.

  2. Combine the fruit with water and let it stand for 24 hours.

  3. Place the seeds in a muslin bag.

Cook and set

  1. Boil the fruit and seeds for 2 hours.

  2. Measure the mixture.

  3. Add sugar, 1 pound for every pint of fruit.

  4. Boil for an additional hour.

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

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

  2. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Sweet oranges
Provide the bulk of the fruit, along with their peel, which gives the marmalade its bitter-sweet character.
Lemons
Add acidity and natural pectin, which help the marmalade thicken and set.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, when boiled with the fruit, helps it gel and preserves it.

The step that matters

Adding the sugar after measuring the mixture. Sugar should be added in the amount set by the fruit volume, since the right sugar-to-fruit ratio lets pectin and acid form a gel. Too little sugar can stop the marmalade from setting.

“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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