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Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from oranges and sugar, boiled for 1.5 hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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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 fruit

  1. Slice 15 oranges and set aside.

  2. Peel 15 oranges, discard the peel, then halve and quarter the fruit.

  3. Squeeze the juice from the remaining oranges, leaving the pulp.

Cook and jar

  1. Combine the fruit and juice with an equal weight of sugar.

  2. Boil the mixture for 1.5 hours.

  3. Can the marmalade.

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 bulk, bitter-sweet flavor, acidity, and natural pectin that helps the marmalade set.
Sugar
Adds sweetness, preserves the fruit, and helps form the gel as the mixture concentrates.

The step that matters

Boiling until the marmalade sets. Sugar, citrus pectin and acid only form a gel once boiling has concentrated the mixture enough. Undercooked marmalade stays runny, while overcooking can make it stiff and dark.

“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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