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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from sliced oranges, water, and sugar boiled until it gels.

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

Prepare

  1. Slice the oranges as thinly as possible.

  2. Combine the sliced oranges with 4 pints of cold water and let it sit overnight.

Cook and set

  1. The next day, boil the mixture for 1 hour.

  2. For every pound of fruit, add 1 pound of sugar.

  3. Continue boiling until it jells when tested on a saucer.

Seal

  1. Seal the marmalade while hot.

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

Oranges
Provide the bitter peel and pulp that give marmalade its characteristic flavour and body.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, with the fruit's pectin and acid, helps it set into a gel.

The step that matters

Boiling until it jells. Marmalade sets only when enough sugar, acid and pectin are concentrated by boiling. Stopping too early leaves a runny preserve, while boiling too long can darken and toughen it.

“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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