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LEMON MARMALADE (another way)
Boil and slice the lemons as in the last recipe; mix them thoroughly with an equal weight of apple pulp. Make a syrup, by boiling one pint of water with every two pounds of sugar, allowing two pounds of sugar to every pound of fruit. Boil the sugar and water together for ten minutes, put in the fruit, and boil again until it is clear. Put it into jars, let it cool, and cover in the usual way. Time, two hours to boil the lemons; forty minutes the marmalade. Probable cost, 8d. per pound.
A two-fruit preserve that leans on apple for body and set, with the lemons doing the flavouring. The instructions assume you have already read the preceding recipe and know what "cover in the usual way" means.
- The missing first step"As in the last recipe" refers back to boiling the lemons, which the time note here puts at about two hours, before slicing them. The preceding recipe is not reproduced, so the handling of pips is unstated; lemon pips are rich in pectin and are commonly tied in a muslin bag and boiled with the fruit.
- Apple pulpThis is cooked apple pushed through a sieve, not raw grated fruit. The recipe does not say which apples; tart cooking apples or crab apples would suit, being high in pectin and acid, which would help this version set more readily than a marmalade of lemons alone.
- The sugar ratioTwo pounds of sugar to one pound of fruit is very high even for a Victorian preserve, and the fruit weight here is presumably lemons and apple pulp combined. A modern marmalade runs closer to equal weights. The result will be sweet, firm and extremely long-keeping.
- "Boil until it is clear"The real test is the setting point, 220F/105C on a sugar thermometer, or a spoonful chilled on a cold saucer that wrinkles when pushed. Clarity arrives before the set does; pulling the pan too early gives syrup, and the forty minutes quoted is a guide rather than a rule.
- Pan sizeSugar syrup at this concentration climbs the pan alarmingly once the fruit goes in. Use a wide preserving pan filled no more than a third, both for safety and because the broad surface speeds evaporation.
- "Cover in the usual way"In period practice this meant a paper or bladder cover tied over the top of the jar. Use sterilised jars and two-piece lids, filled to within a quarter inch of the rim while the marmalade is still hot.
- Yield and costThe recipe scales freely; a pound of lemons with a pound of apple pulp and four pounds of sugar gives roughly six pounds of finished marmalade, or five or six standard jars. The 8d. per pound is a household costing note of the period, not an instruction.
Cassell's gives lemon marmalade a run of variants because marmalade in the nineteenth century still meant any thick fruit preserve stiff enough to slice, from the Portuguese marmelada, a paste of quinces, before the Scottish orange version is often said to have narrowed the word in most British kitchens. Stretching an expensive imported citrus with home-grown apple was ordinary economy: apples were cheap, kept through the winter in any dry loft, and brought useful pectin to the pan. The habit of quoting a probable cost per pound, which runs through the whole dictionary, was aimed squarely at the mistress of a household budgeting against the greengrocer, and at the cook who had to justify the sugar.