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Sueter Marmalade
Slice one orange, one lemon and one grape fruit, rejecting nothing but seeds and core; measure the fruit and add to it two and one-half times the quantity of water. Let it stand in an earthen dish over night, and the next day boil for ten minutes only. Let it stand another night, and the second morning add pint for pint of sugar and boil steadily until it jellies. Cut the sliced fruit with scissors.
— Miss Helen B. Hahn
This is the classic three-fruit marmalade, worked out by volume rather than weight and spread across three days. The method is sound; only a few details need translating.
- Measure by volume, not weight"Measure the fruit" means tipping the sliced fruit into a measuring jug and reading off the cups. Three fruits might give something like 4 to 5 cups sliced, so 10 to 12 cups of water; the sugar later is matched pint for pint, most plausibly to the cooked fruit and liquid.
- The two long soaks are the pointStanding overnight twice, with a short boil between, is how pectin and bitterness are drawn out of the peel and pith without cooking the fruit to mush. Skipping the soaks tends to give a looser set and peel that stays tough.
- Don't discard the seeds entirelySeeds and core are rich in pectin. If you want extra insurance for the set, tie them in a square of muslin, soak and boil them with the fruit, then lift the bag out and squeeze it before the sugar goes in.
- An earthen dishAny non-reactive vessel does: glass, glazed stoneware, or stainless steel. The warning behind the phrase is against bare copper, iron or aluminium, which citrus attacks over a long soak.
- Ten minutes onlyThe first boil is deliberately brief: enough to soften peel and start pectin extraction without boiling away liquid you still need.
- "Boil until it jellies"Setting point is 220F (104C) at sea level, or about 8F above the boiling point of water where you live. Without a thermometer, use the cold-saucer test: a spoonful chilled a minute should wrinkle when pushed.
- Cutting with scissorsAn old preserver's trick worth keeping: snipping softened slices into shreds is faster and neater than trying to julienne raw citrus. The recipe doesn't say at which stage to do it.
- Yield and keepingYield depends on how far the batch is boiled down; measure as you fill. For shelf storage, fill sterilised jars to a quarter inch of the rim and process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes; otherwise refrigerate and use within a month.
Three-fruit marmalade — orange, lemon and grapefruit together — fits a period when grapefruit was moving from a Florida novelty to a familiar Northern breakfast fruit, roughly the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth, as rail transport made citrus a winter commodity. The multi-day soak belongs to the older British marmalade tradition, which relies on nothing but time and the fruit's own pectin; commercial bottled pectin reached home kitchens in the 1910s, and community cookbooks of this kind often predate its adoption. The odd title may be a misprint of a family name rather than a description of the preserve, though there is no way to confirm it from the page.