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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from oranges, lemons, water, and sugar, boiled until jelly.

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. Quarter the oranges and lemons, squeeze the juice, and slice them thin.

  2. Place all the fruit in a stone jar and add 9 pints of water.

  3. Leave the mixture overnight.

Cook and set

  1. In the morning, boil for 2 hours.

  2. Add 7 pounds of granulated sugar.

  3. Cook until it forms a jelly when cool.

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

Oranges
Provide the bitter peel and juice that give marmalade its characteristic flavor and pectin.
Lemons
Add acidity and extra pectin, helping the marmalade set.
Granulated sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and helps it set into a jelly as it cooks.

The step that matters

Cook until it forms a jelly when cool. Marmalade sets because pectin, acid and sugar reach the right balance as water evaporates. Stopping too early leaves it runny, while cooking too long can make it stiff and dull.

“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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