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Dessert

Dundee Marmalade

A marmalade made from bitter and sweet oranges, lemons, sugar, and hot water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Dundee Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the bitter oranges in half through the stem and scrape out the pulp, saving the seeds and skin.

  2. Place the seeds and skin in a muslin bag and squeeze, using 1 pint of hot water to help extract the juice.

  3. Boil the peels until tender, then scrape off almost all the white from the inside and cut the peel into fine pieces.

Make the marmalade

  1. In a kettle, combine the sugar and pulp when it comes to a boil, then add the cut peel.

  2. Boil for exactly 20 minutes.

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. Bitter orange + orangetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together23 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetal (cream, earthy).

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  4. Bitter orange + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together21 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Sugar + orangetop 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

Bitter oranges
Provide the characteristic bitter flavour and the peel and pectin that help the marmalade set.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, at high concentration, helps it set and keep.
Sweet oranges
Add sweetness and citrus body to balance the bitter oranges.
Lemons
Add acidity that brightens flavour and supports setting.

The step that matters

Boil for exactly 20 minutes. Boiling the sugar, fruit and peel drives off water and concentrates sugar, so the mixture can reach the gel point. Too short a boil leaves it runny, while overboiling can darken and toughen the flavour.

Swap the bitter orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, orange, lemon):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Bitter orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, orange, lemon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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