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Grape Fruit Marmalade
One grape fruit, one orange, one lemon; cut each in quarters, take out the seeds, and put through a food-chopper. Measure and add an equal quantity of water to the chopped fruit, and boil ten minutes. Let stand over night and then add sugar pound for pound and boil until sufficiently thick (about two hours), then pour into glasses or jars.
— Miss Lydia W. Bagley
A classic three-fruit marmalade, made by the old "measure and match" method rather than by clock and thermometer. The proportions are sound; what the recipe leaves out is how to tell when it has set and how to put it up safely.
- Use the whole fruitQuartering and grinding means peel, pith and membrane all go in. That is the point: the pectin lives in the pith and seeds, and it is what makes the marmalade set. Pull out the seeds as instructed, but do not peel anything.
- Food-chopper equivalentA hand-cranked food chopper produced a coarse, ragged mince, not a puree. Pulse in a food processor a few times only, or slice the quarters thin by hand for a more traditional shred.
- Sugar pound for poundThis means weighing the boiled fruit-and-water mixture after the overnight rest and adding an equal weight of sugar. One grapefruit, one orange and one lemon with matching water will give roughly 3 lb of pulp, so expect about the same weight of sugar. Cutting the sugar well below 1:1 makes the set less certain and shortens how long it keeps.
- Why it stands overnightThe rest lets pectin leach out of the peel and softens the shreds so they do not stay tough after sugaring. Cover it and leave it at room temperature; it will not spoil in a night.
- "Sufficiently thick" means 220FTwo hours is a wide guess that depends on your pan. Cook in a wide, heavy pot and start testing at 45 minutes: setting point is 220F (105C) at sea level, or a spoonful chilled on a cold saucer that wrinkles when pushed. Overcooking past this gives a dark, sticky marmalade that tastes of caramel rather than citrus.
- Jars"Pour into glasses" refers to tumblers sealed with a disc of melted paraffin, which is no longer recommended. Fill sterilized canning jars to a quarter-inch of the rim, seal, and process in a boiling-water bath for 10 minutes, or simply refrigerate and use within a month.
- BitternessGrapefruit pith is markedly more bitter than orange. If you want a milder result, discard the grapefruit's central core and the thick white column at each end before grinding.
- YieldRoughly six to seven half-pint jars, depending on how large the fruit is and how far you reduce it.
Three-fruit marmalade — grapefruit, orange and lemon together — became a staple of American community cookbooks in the first decades of the twentieth century, as citrus reached northern grocers in reliable winter quantities. Grapefruit in particular was still something of a novelty in the 1890s and early 1900s, promoted heavily as a breakfast fruit, and cooks who found it too sharp to eat plain turned it into preserves. The method here, boiling the fruit with water, resting it overnight and then matching sugar to the weight of the pulp, is the standard English marmalade technique carried over intact; it predates commercial pectin and relies wholly on what the peel supplies. That the recipe is credited to a named contributor is typical of the fundraising cookbooks compiled by church guilds and ladies' aid societies, where a recipe traveled attached to the woman known for making it well.