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Vegetable Marrow Marmalade

A marmalade made from sliced vegetable marrow, lemon, sugar, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Vegetable Marrow Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the marrow

  1. Pare and cut the vegetable marrow into small, thin slices.

  2. Grate the yellow rind from the lemon.

  3. Sprinkle the grated rind, the lemon juice, and half the sugar over the marrow.

  4. Let the mixture stand for 24 hours.

Cook and jar

  1. Boil the remaining sugar with the water until clear.

  2. Add the marrow to the boiling mixture.

  3. Cook for 1 hour.

  4. Pour the marmalade into jars.

  5. Cover the jars when cold.

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

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

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

Young vegetable marrow
Forms the bulk of the marmalade and gives it its body as it softens during cooking.
Preserving sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and helps it set and keep by binding water.
Lemon
Adds acidity and aroma from its rind and juice, balancing the sweetness.

The step that matters

Standing the marrow with sugar and lemon for 24 hours. Sugar drawn into the marrow by standing softens and firms the slices and lets the sugar penetrate before cooking, so the marmalade cooks evenly and sets rather than turning mushy.

“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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