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Greengage Marmalade
Take six pounds of ripe greengages, and remove the stalks. Boil the fruit quickly for about three-quarters of an hour, then rub it through a sieve with a wooden spoon, leaving the skins and stones behind. Return the pulp to the pan, add four pounds of loaf sugar, boil again for about twenty minutes, stirring constantly, and removing the scum as it rises. Drop a little on a cold plate, and when it is found to set quickly, pour it into pots, and tie down whilst hot. Probable cost, 8d. per pound.
A plum jam in all but name, sieved smooth. It is a sound method, but two things in it assume a Victorian range and a Victorian larder: the first boiling with no added liquid, and the paper-and-string seal.
- Start with a little waterSix pounds of whole gages in a dry pan will catch before they collapse unless the heat is very gentle and the pan very heavy. A cupful of water in the bottom lets the fruit steam down for the first ten minutes without scorching; it boils off long before the sieving stage.
- Loaf sugar is just sugarLoaf sugar came as a cone of refined white sugar to be nipped off with sugar cutters. Ordinary granulated sugar is the same thing, weight for weight. Jam sugar, which has added pectin, is not needed here and risks a stiff, overset preserve; preserving sugar (large crystals, no pectin) is harmless but no advantage.
- The set is the whole recipeTwenty minutes is a guide, not a rule. A 4 lb sugar to 6 lb fruit ratio is on the low side, and very ripe gages carry less pectin, so a full rolling boil of 25 to 35 minutes is common. Trust the cold plate test, or a thermometer at 220F (105C).
- Sieving hotPush the pulp through a nylon or stainless sieve rather than a fine-mesh strainer, and do it while the fruit is hot and slack. Once it cools, the pulp stiffens and you lose a good deal of it to the skins. A mouli-legumes does the same job faster.
- Stirring means stirringSieved stone-fruit pulp with no skins or pieces to break up the mass burns readily and spits. Use a wide heavy pan, a long-handled wooden spoon, and keep the base moving the entire twenty minutes.
- "Tie down whilst hot"The original means a disc of waxed paper on the surface and a paper or bladder cover tied over the rim. Modern practice is hot jam into hot sterilised jars, filled to within a quarter inch, lidded at once; a 10-minute water bath if you want long unrefrigerated storage.
- YieldExpect roughly 6 lb of finished marmalade once the skins and stones are discarded and the boiling losses are allowed for, or about eight 12 oz jars.
- The price8d. per pound is eightpence in pre-decimal currency, given as it was throughout Cassell's so a cook could cost her work against shop-bought preserves.
Greengages are a group of green-fleshed, unusually sweet dessert plums; the English name is generally traced to the Gage family of Suffolk, who are said to have introduced the French Reine Claude to England in the eighteenth century, the label having been lost in transit. Calling the result "marmalade" rather than jam reflects older usage, in which marmalade meant any fruit pulp boiled to a stiff paste with sugar (from the Portuguese marmelada, a quince paste) long before the word narrowed to mean citrus. The insistence on sieving may owe something to that older sense — a marmalade in the Victorian sense was smooth and firm, not a jam full of skins — though it is at least as likely to be simply the practical way of getting skins and stones out of gages. Its presence in Cassell's is practical rather than decorative. Gages have a short, glut-heavy season and bruise quickly, so the household that grew or bought them cheaply in late August had a few days to turn them into something that would keep the winter, and the sugar did that work.