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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from sliced oranges, water, sugar, and lemon juice, boiled until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Orange Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice the oranges thin and remove the seeds.

  2. Cover the oranges with 3 quarts of water and let it stand overnight.

Cook

  1. Boil the mixture slowly for 2 hours.

  2. Add 5 pounds of white sugar and the juice of 2 lemons.

  3. Boil for an additional 2 hours, or longer if needed.

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

Oranges
Provide the peel and pulp that form the marmalade's body and bitter flavor.
White sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and helps it thicken and set as it cooks.
Lemons
Add acidity that brightens flavor and supports gel formation with the pectin.

The step that matters

Boil for an additional 2 hours, or longer if needed. Sugar must be fully dissolved and the mixture boiled until it reaches the gel point, since undercooked marmalade stays runny and overcooked marmalade can turn stiff or caramelised.

“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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