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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserved citrus spread made from oranges, salt, and sugar.

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 the oranges

  1. Peel the oranges.

  2. Quarter the oranges. Remove seeds and inner skins.

  3. Soak the peel overnight in water with dissolved salt.

  4. Boil the peel in clear water until tender.

  5. Chop the tender peel finely.

Make the marmalade

  1. Add the juice and pulp of the oranges to the chopped peel.

  2. Weigh the mixture and add an equal amount of white sugar.

  3. Slowly bring to a boil and let it boil for 30 minutes, stirring carefully.

Jar and seal

  1. Pour into pint glass jars or jelly tumblers.

  2. Seal with a round of paper dipped in unbeaten egg white, pressing it firmly onto the glass.

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
Supply the bitter peel for texture and the juice and pulp for flavour and body.
White sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and helps it thicken and set as it cooks.
Coarse sea salt
Dissolved in the soaking water to draw out bitterness from the peel.

The step that matters

Slowly bring to a boil and boil for 30 minutes. Sugar and fruit pectin only set properly at a high enough concentration, so the mixture must be stirred carefully to avoid scorching and boiled long enough to reach a gel point.

“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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