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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserved orange spread made by cooking oranges with water, sugar, and lemon juice.

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. Combine sliced oranges and water in a large bowl and let stand for 24 hours.

Cook

  1. Cook the mixture for 3 to 4 hours.

  2. Add 1 pint of sugar for each pint of oranges and boil for 1 hour.

Finish

  1. Remove from heat and stir in the juice of 4 lemons.

  2. Pour into jelly glasses.

  3. Use less water for a thicker 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 + 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 bulk of the marmalade and its bitter peel flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, with boiling, helps it thicken into a spread.
Lemons
Add acidity that brightens flavour and supports setting.

The step that matters

Boiling with the sugar. The sugar is added to the cooked fruit and boiled for a full hour. Sugar and acid together help the pectin in the fruit form a gel, so the mixture must boil long enough to thicken, but not so long that it scorches or turns bitter.

“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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