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Orange Marmalade
Take any number of oranges, the small Messina oranges selling in the spring at eighteen for twenty-five cents are particularly good for marmalade. Allow one lemon to each four or five oranges. Wipe each fruit with a damp cloth, cut each in quarters, then cut each quarter through pulp and rind into very thin slices, discarding all seeds. Set the fruit on a board for slicing. Take three pints of cold water for each pound of prepared fruit. Let the fruit stand in the water twenty-four hours. Cook till the peel is very tender (about six hours).
Let stand again twenty-four hours. Weigh and add one pound of sugar for each pound of material, let cook until the syrup jellies on a cold dish, or to 218° F.
A three-day marmalade in the old style: soak, boil, rest, then sweeten and set. Nothing here is difficult, but the water quantity and the finishing temperature both need a second look.
- Messina orangesSmall, thin-skinned Sicilian oranges imported cheaply in spring. Bitter Seville oranges, available January to March, are the usual modern marmalade fruit and a reasonable substitute; ordinary navels will give a sweeter, flabbier marmalade and need the full complement of lemon.
- Three pints per pound is deliberateThree pints per pound is roughly six cups of water to a pound of fruit, far more than modern recipes use -- presumably to soften the peel over the long soak and slow boil. Expect the volume to reduce substantially before the sugar goes in.
- Six hours is a maximum, not a targetThinly sliced peel from small fruit is usually tender in one to two hours of gentle simmering. Test by pinching a strip between finger and thumb; when it crushes with no resistance, stop. Overcooked peel disintegrates into the syrup.
- When to weighThe instruction to weigh and add equal sugar applies to the whole cooked mass, fruit and remaining liquid together, after the second rest. Weigh the pot empty first so you can subtract it.
- Keep the seedsThe recipe discards them, but citrus seeds and pith carry most of the pectin. Tie them in muslin, simmer them with the fruit, and lift the bag out before adding sugar. This matters more with sweet oranges than with bitter ones.
- 218F sets softStandard setting point is 220-222F at sea level, and 218F will give a loose, spoonable marmalade. Subtract about 1F per 500 feet of elevation. The cold-plate test is the more reliable of the two checks given: a spoonful chilled a minute should wrinkle when pushed.
- SealingThe recipe gives no instructions for putting the marmalade up. Current practice is a boiling-water bath, 10 minutes for half-pints, adjusted for altitude, in jars with two-piece lids.
- YieldImpossible to predict closely from the original, since it depends on how far the mass is reduced before the sugar goes in; expect somewhere in the region of one to two pints per pound of prepared fruit.
Marmalade in the English-speaking kitchen means citrus, but the word came from the Portuguese marmelada, a stiff quince paste, and only migrated to oranges in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the shift to a loose, peel-suspended preserve is generally traced to Scotland, where Dundee makers commercialised it in the nineteenth century. The seasonal logic in this recipe is the real point: bitter and small sour oranges were said to be at their cheapest and most plentiful in the colder months, and a household that wanted marmalade made its supply while the fruit was to be had.