Home › The Principles of Cookery › Vegetable Marrow Marmalade
Vegetable Marrow Marmalade
Pare and seed any quantity of moderate-sized vegetable marrows, and cut them into thin slices. Weigh them, and allow a pound of loaf sugar, the rind of half a small lemon, chopped small, and a cupful of water to every pound of marrow. Boil the sugar and water to a clear syrup. Put in the marrow, and let it simmer gently for an hour and a half. Be careful that it does not burn. Strip the thick white skin from the lemons, slice them, take away the pips, mix these slices with the marmalade, and let all boil together for a quarter of an hour. Turn the marmalade into jars, and cover these in the usual way. An excellent imitation of preserved ginger may be made with vegetable marrow (see GINGER, PRESERVED, IMITATION OF).
A Victorian glut preserve: marrow has almost no flavour of its own, so it takes on the sugar and lemon and becomes something like a candied fruit conserve. Two things matter — a heavy pan, and knowing that this will not set like a pectin jam.
- Vegetable marrowAn overgrown summer squash, the same species as courgette/zucchini, the marrow cultivars being grown on to full size. A large zucchini or any pale-fleshed marrow works; peel it, scoop out the seedy core, and use only the firm flesh. Slices about 1/4 inch thick hold their shape through the long simmer.
- Loaf sugarRefined white sugar, sold in the period as a hard cone to be broken up. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct replacement, weight for weight.
- A cupful of waterGenuinely ambiguous in an English book of this date — anywhere from 8 to 10 fl oz. Err on the low side; the marrow releases a great deal of its own liquid once the sugar draws on it.
- The lemon instructionsThe recipe uses the lemons twice and is confusing about it. Take the zest of half a lemon, chopped fine, at the start; later, peel away the white pith from the remaining lemon, slice the flesh, discard the pips, and add those slices for the final fifteen minutes.
- Watching the panThe warning about burning is the hinge. A 1:1 sugar syrup simmering ninety minutes will catch the moment the liquid drops, so use the heaviest-based pan you own, keep the heat genuinely low, and stir up from the bottom every few minutes toward the end.
- Knowing when it is doneMarrow has no pectin worth counting, so this thickens by evaporation and candying rather than gelling. The slices should turn translucent and the syrup coat a spoon; 220F on a sugar thermometer is a fair marker. Expect a loose, ginger-preserve texture, not a firm jam.
- Covering and storage"The usual way" meant a paper disc and a tied-down cover, which relied on the sugar alone. Marrow is low in acid, and the lemon here is a flavouring rather than a reliable acidifier. Fill sterilised jars hot, seal, and keep them refrigerated; use within a couple of months and treat any jar that ferments or smells yeasty as spoiled.
- YieldRoughly 1 lb of prepared marrow plus 1 lb of sugar gives in the region of 16 fl oz of finished preserve — about two 8 oz jars — though the exact yield depends on how far it reduces.
"Marmalade" in Victorian usage still meant any fruit boiled to a thick preserve, not specifically the orange breakfast kind, which is why marrow can wear the name here without apology. Vegetable marrows were a fixture of British kitchen gardens and allotments, and the late-summer glut of them — a single plant will produce more than a household can eat as a vegetable — encouraged a range of marrow preserves, marrow and ginger jam among them, and the "imitation preserved ginger" cross-referenced at the end. Real preserved ginger was an expensive import from China, sold in stoneware jars, and the trick of candying bland marrow in a heavy syrup with ginger to stand in for it appears in other nineteenth-century household books as well. That the substitution appears at all says something about the period: a plentiful garden vegetable, sugar cheap enough by the later nineteenth century to use pound for pound, and an appetite for luxuries that most kitchens could only approximate.