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Dessert

Lemon Marmalade

A preserved lemon spread made by boiling lemon skins, pulp, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Lemon Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peel

  1. Grate the skins off the lemons.

  2. Place the grated skins in a brass pan with warm water.

  3. Boil for 20 minutes.

Make the marmalade

  1. In a basin, break and squeeze the lemons through a sieve over the sugar.

  2. Boil the pulp with a little water for 10 minutes.

  3. Press the boiled pulp through the sieve into the sugar.

  4. Add the drained lemon gratings.

  5. Boil until it jellies.

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. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Lemon and sugar 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

Lemons
Provide the peel, pulp and juice that give the marmalade its bitter-sour flavour and pectin.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, as it thickens, helps it set into a firm jelly.

The step that matters

Boil until it jellies. Marmalade sets when pectin, acid and sugar reach the right balance at a high enough concentration. Stopping too early leaves it runny, while boiling too long can darken and dull the flavour.

“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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