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Dessert

Marmalade

A preserve made from Seville orange peels, pulp, sugar, and lemon juice, boiled until clear.

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

Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peel

  1. Cut the Seville oranges in half, remove the pulp and skins, and boil the peels in a large pot of water until soft, changing the water two or three times.

  2. Once cool, drain and cut the peels into thin strips.

  3. Separate the pulp from the skin and seeds.

  4. Weigh the pulp and peels, then measure out an equal weight of sugar.

Make the marmalade

  1. Boil the pulp gently with the sugar until it forms a syrup.

  2. Add the peels to the syrup and boil gently for half an hour, stirring constantly.

  3. For every dozen oranges, add the juice of 6 lemons.

  4. Weigh all ingredients together and boil until the marmalade reaches a clear consistency.

  5. Remove any foam that rises while boiling.

Store

  1. Once done, store the marmalade in jars.

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. Sugar + lemontop 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).

Sugar and lemon 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

Seville oranges
Supply the bitter peel and pectin-rich pulp that give marmalade its body and characteristic flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, at this quantity, helps it set and keeps it preserved.
Lemons
Add acidity and extra pectin, which help the marmalade set and balance the sweetness.

The step that matters

Boiling until the marmalade reaches a clear consistency. Marmalade sets when pectin, sugar and acid reach the right concentration. Boiling too briefly leaves it runny, while overcooking darkens its colour and flavour, so the set must be judged carefully.

“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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