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Orange and Pineapple Marmalade
1 pineapple 4 oranges 1 lemon 3 pints of water to each pint of fruit 1 pint of sugar to each pint of cooked material Remove the outside of the pineapple; the "eyes" may be removed easily with a strawberry huller; with the same utensil or a silver fork, pick the flesh in shreds from the core; cut the oranges and lemon in quarters and each quarter in slices as thin as possible. Measure the fruit; add the water, cover, and set aside until the next day; let boil until the rind of the fruit is exceedingly tender; it will take three or more hours; set aside until the next day; measure, add the sugar, and let boil rapidly until the syrup thickens when tested on a cold dish. This marmalade requires a little longer cooking than marmalade made entirely of citrus fruits.
A three-day marmalade in which the fruit is soaked, then long-boiled to soften the peel, and only sweetened at the end. The proportions are given by volume rather than weight, which is workable once you know what is being measured.
- The proportions, read plainlyThree pints of water go in for every pint of prepared raw fruit, and a pint of sugar for every pint of the cooked mass measured the next day. The recipe never states how many oranges or how much pineapple; the quantity is genuinely open.
- Measure by volume, not weightA pint here is the American pint, 16 fl oz, or 2 cups. Shreds of pineapple and thin orange slices pack loosely, and the sugar is measured against the cooked fruit rather than the raw.
- Why the peel comes firstPreservers have long held that citrus rind stops softening once sugar is in the pan. The long boil before sweetening -- the recipe allows three hours or more -- is the hinge of the whole method, and cutting it short is likely to leave hard, leathery strips in the finished jar.
- The overnight restsThe first standing period gives the water time to penetrate the rind before boiling begins. The recipe treats both rests as part of the method rather than idle time, but it gives no reason for either and does not say what is lost by skipping them.
- Pineapple brings acid, not pectinPineapple is low in pectin, and the orange and lemon rind supply most of the setting power. The recipe's closing note that this mixture needs longer cooking than an all-citrus marmalade is consistent with that, though it offers no explanation of its own.
- Testing the setThe cold-dish test is reliable: a spoonful on a chilled saucer should wrinkle when pushed after a minute. If you prefer a thermometer, 220F at sea level is the corresponding point.
- ToolsA strawberry huller is a small spring-loaded tweezer; a paring knife tip or a stiff fork does the same job on pineapple eyes and shreds. Use a wide, heavy pan, since the sugar stage boils hard and foams.
- Filling and keepingThe recipe says nothing about filling or sealing. Current practice is to fill sterilised jars to a quarter-inch headspace and process in a boiling-water bath for ten minutes; unprocessed jars should be treated as refrigerator marmalade.
Marmalade takes its name from the Portuguese marmelada, a stiff quince paste, and only settled into its modern sense of a bitter-citrus preserve in Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with Dundee doing much to fix the shredded-peel style in the popular mind. Pineapple in a marmalade pot has a longer history than is sometimes assumed, since pineapple preserves predate the twentieth century; by the 1900s and 1910s pineapple was reaching mainland American markets from the Caribbean and Florida fresh enough for home preservers to work with, while Hawaiian fruit travelled canned. Books of this period, aimed at housekeepers putting up fruit in season, are full of such hybrids, and they often close by noting that the mixture needs longer cooking than plain citrus marmalade.