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Marmalade, Orange, Scotch
There are many ways of making this marmalade; but most agree in the proportion of sugar to fruit. We give the simplest and most economical way. Boil the oranges until they are tender, and can be easily pierced with the head of a pin. When this is done, cut them open, remove the seeds, separate the pulp from the rind, and clear off the coarse filmy parts from the orange, and some of the white inner part of the rind. Shred the rind, the finer the better, and some of it may even be pounded and added with the shreds to the pulp. Clarify the sugar, allowing one pound and a half of sugar to each pound of fruit. Boil the syrup for ten minutes. Throw in the pulp, juice, and rind, and let all boil together till the marmalade jellies. Sweet oranges are sometimes used for marmalade, and only a small portion of Seville or lemon pulp and rind is added to flavour. Time to boil the oranges, from three to four hours; marmalade, thirty to forty minutes. (See also ORANGE. MARMALADE.)
A whole-fruit marmalade of the plainest kind: boil the oranges soft, shred them, and cook with clarified syrup. Two things in it need adjusting — the boiling time and the sugar-clarifying step.
- The hinge: judge the set, not the clock"Till the marmalade jellies" is the only instruction that matters. Setting point is 220F/104.5C on a sugar thermometer, or a spoonful chilled on a cold saucer that wrinkles when pushed. Thirty to forty minutes is a fair estimate for a small batch, but a wide pan and a wet season will both change it.
- Three to four hours is too longModern Sevilles simmered whole in plenty of water are tender in about 1½ to 2 hours — test with a skewer through the peel. Long boiling leaches flavour and pectin into the cooking water, which the recipe makes no further use of.
- Save the cooking waterThat water holds dissolved pectin. Use a portion of it as the liquid for your syrup rather than fresh water, and the set comes more readily.
- Don't throw the pipsSeeds and the filmy membranes the recipe tells you to clear away are the richest pectin source in the fruit. Tie them in muslin, boil them with the marmalade, and lift the bag out before potting.
- Clarifying the sugarThis was necessary when sugar carried scum and sediment. Modern granulated or preserving sugar needs no clarifying — dissolve it in the liquid over low heat, then boil the syrup ten minutes as directed.
- Which oranges"Seville" means the bitter orange, in season roughly January to February; it is what gives marmalade its edge. The note about sweet oranges with a little Seville or lemon added is a genuine economy measure, but the result is markedly milder and sets less easily.
- Proportions and yield1½ lb sugar to 1 lb fruit; the recipe does not say at what stage the fruit is weighed. Two pounds of oranges with three pounds of sugar gives roughly five to six half-pint jars.
- PottingThe entry gives no potting instructions. For keeping at room temperature, use sterilised jars and process filled jars in a boiling water bath according to current preserving guidance; otherwise refrigerate and eat within a few weeks.
Marmalade began as a quince paste — the word comes from the Portuguese marmelo, quince — and only became an orange preserve in Britain over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as bitter Seville oranges arrived through the winter trade. The "Scotch" in the title marks the shred: Scottish households favoured a loose, clear jelly full of cut peel, in contrast to the smooth pastes and stiff conserves sold earlier, and Dundee became the commercial centre of the trade in the nineteenth century. The often-repeated story of a Dundee grocer buying a distressed cargo of Spanish oranges is traditional rather than documented. What Cassell's entry really records is a domestic economy: bitter oranges were cheap for a few weeks a year, sugar had become cheap all year, and a household could lay in enough breakfast preserve for twelve months in a single afternoon's boiling.