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Orange Preserves with Honey
Cut the oranges in crosswise slices about three eighths of an inch in thickness, discarding the seeds. Cover the slices with cold water and let stand over night. Cook until tender. Add half the weight of the cooked orange and liquid in honey and half the weight in sugar, and let cook until the liquid is well reduced. Honey may be used in whole or part in the making of any preserves.
A weight-based preserve rather than a measured one, so a kitchen scale is not optional. The whole sliced fruit — peel, pith and all — is what gives it body and bite.
- Weigh after cooking, not beforeThe sugar and honey are calculated on the weight of the cooked orange plus its liquid: half that weight in honey and half in sugar, so the total sweetener equals the weight of the fruit and syrup. Tare the pan, or turn the cooked fruit into a bowl on the scale.
- The overnight soak has a purposeStanding in cold water softens the peel and leaches out some of the bitter compounds in the pith. Drain and use fresh water for the cooking if your oranges are thick-skinned; keep the soaking water if you want a more marmalade-like edge.
- Which orangesAny sweet orange works; Seville or other bitter oranges give a sharper preserve and need the soak more than most. Discard seeds as you slice, or tie them in muslin and cook them with the fruit for extra pectin, then lift them out.
- "Cook until tender"Simmer the slices in their water, covered, until the peel can be pierced easily with a fork and shows no rubbery resistance — usually 40 minutes to an hour depending on thickness. Peel that is not fully tender before the sugar goes in will soften little afterwards, as sugar makes further softening difficult.
- Judging "well reduced"The syrup is done at about 220F/104C at sea level, or when a spoonful chilled on a cold plate wrinkles when pushed. Honey scorches more readily than sugar, so keep the heat moderate and stir the bottom of the pan once the syrup thickens.
- What the honey doesHoney is at least as sweet as sugar, often a shade sweeter, and contributes its own flavour, browns faster, and holds moisture, so the finished preserve is a little softer and darker than an all-sugar version. Use a mild honey — clover or orange blossom — unless you want the honey to dominate.
- Yield and storageThe book gives no processing instructions here; store the filled jars in the refrigerator and use within a few weeks, or follow a current tested water-bath schedule for citrus preserves if you intend to keep them on a shelf.
Domestic-science writers were pressing home cooks to stretch or replace refined sugar. Hence the closing line, which is really the point of the entry: honey may stand in for sugar, in whole or in part, in any preserve. Honey was the older sweetener of the two, and sugar-and-honey preserves appear in European cookery long before cane sugar became cheap; what is distinctly modern here is the arithmetic, the habit of weighing fruit and syrup and fixing the ratio, which came out of the scientific cookery movement and its cooking schools. The technique of slicing whole citrus crosswise and soaking it overnight is the same one behind sliced-orange marmalade, a reminder that in this period the line between a marmalade and a preserve was drawn by texture and by the maker, not by any rule.