Skip to main content
Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserved citrus spread made from oranges, water, sugar, and optional lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 the oranges

  1. Wash the oranges.

  2. Slice the oranges thin, discarding the ends.

  3. Chop the sliced oranges finely.

  4. Combine the chopped oranges and water in a bowl and let sit overnight.

Cook the marmalade

  1. Boil the mixture for 50 minutes.

  2. Let the mixture cool until the next morning.

  3. Add 1 ¼ pounds of sugar to the mixture.

  4. Boil the mixture for 1 hour.

  5. Optionally, add a little lemon juice after boiling.

Jar

  1. Pour the marmalade into glasses and cover.

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
Peel and pith supply the bitterness and pectin that help the marmalade set.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, with boiling, helps it thicken and keep.
Water
Softens the chopped orange and lets it simmer down into a spreadable mixture.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture for 1 hour after adding sugar. Sugar must dissolve and the mixture must reach a full boil so pectin and sugar can gel. Too little cooking leaves marmalade runny, while overcooking can darken and bitter it.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (orange, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Figfits less well
  4. Pineapplefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, sugar. 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.

More orange marmalade recipes

Seville 44Pudding 17Clear 10Scotch 6Bitter 4 See all 487 →

You might also like

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipes