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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from sliced oranges, water, and sugar, boiled and jelled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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

Soak the oranges

  1. Thinly slice the oranges.

  2. Combine the sliced oranges and water in a pot and let stand for 12 hours.

Make the marmalade

  1. Boil the mixture for 1 hour.

  2. Add the sugar and let it stand overnight.

  3. Boil again until the mixture jells.

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

Marmalade oranges
Supply pectin and peel flavor that help the marmalade set and give it a bitter edge.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and helps it thicken and set as the mixture boils down.

The step that matters

Boil again until the mixture jells. Pectin from the oranges sets only at a high enough sugar and concentration, so the boil must continue until the mixture reaches its setting point. Stopping too early leaves a runny marmalade, while boiling too long can make it stiff and dull in flavor.

“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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