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Orange and Grapefruit Marmalade
Has flavor of orange and "bitter" of Grapefruit 2 Oranges and 2 Grapefruit (medium size) level cups (2 lbs.) Prepared Pulp and Rinds 7½ level cups (34 lbs.) Sugar bottle (scant ½ cup) CERTO Peel grapefruit moderately thin, like an apple, and discard yellow peel. Remove white rind in quarters right down to the meats, and set aside. Break up meats, remove core and seeds, and cut or crush pulp fine. Peel off orange skins in quarters down to meats and set aside. Break up orange pulp, remove seeds, and combine orange and grapefruit pulps CERTO and juice in medium-sized saucepan. Put grapefruit whites through food chopper, or chop fine by hand, and boil slowly with 3 cups water in covered saucepan for 15 minutes to get the bitter extract. Press all liquor possible from cooked whites, through a sieve, into saucepan with combined pulps, and discard cooked whites. Simmer pulp and drained liquor in covered pan 45 minutes. Meanwhile boil orange skins with 4 cups water in covered pan ½ hour, to make tender. Drain off and discard water. With sharp-edged spoon scrape out and discard all white part right down to yellow rind. Then with a very sharp knife shred rinds just as thin as possible in shreds about 1 inch long. Mix shredded rinds with cooked pulp and proceed as on page 10.
A two-part marmalade: the grapefruit's white pith is boiled separately to draw out its bitterness, while the orange peel alone is kept for shreds. Read the whole method before starting, since three pans run at once.
- Certo is liquid pectinThe original 8-ounce Certo bottle held about a cup, so a "scant half bottle" is roughly 3½ fl oz — close to one modern 3 fl oz pouch of liquid pectin. Liquid and powdered pectin are not interchangeable; powdered is added to the fruit before the sugar, liquid after the boil.
- When the pectin goes inLiquid pectin belongs at the very end: bring fruit and sugar to a hard rolling boil, stir in the pectin, boil one minute more, then take it off the heat. CERTO appears in the line about combining the pulps, but that looks like the ingredient list running into the text — the recipe sends you to the master method on page 10 for the boil. Do not add it to the raw pulp: the long simmering would destroy its setting power.
- Two bitters, two peelsThe bitterness comes only from the grapefruit's white rind, boiled 15 minutes and then discarded once its liquor is pressed out. The shreds in the finished jar are orange rind only, which is why the orange skins get their own half-hour boil to tenderize.
- Scraping the orange rindAfter boiling the orange skins, scrape the white pith away down to the colored zest before shredding. Pith left on the shreds turns woody and muddies the clear jelly.
- The proportionsThe recipe gives 2 lb. prepared pulp and rinds (the cup figure is lost in this printing) to 7½ level cups sugar; that sugar weighs about 3¼ lb. Do not reduce the sugar: liquid pectin needs a high sugar concentration to gel, and a low-sugar batch made this way will stay syrup.
- Skimming and packingLet the finished marmalade stand five minutes off the heat and skim the foam, then stir gently a moment so the shreds distribute instead of floating to the top of each jar.
- SealingPeriod Certo leaflets finished jars under melted paraffin. Paraffin seals are no longer considered sound — they crack and admit mold. Use two-piece lids and a boiling-water bath, or refrigerate and eat within a month.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; a batch this size will fill somewhere in the region of eight to ten 8-ounce jars, depending on how much of the extract liquor is left in.
Certo was one of the first commercial fruit pectins sold to home cooks, and the little recipe booklets that came with the bottle did real work: pectin extract let a cook set a preserve in a few minutes of hard boiling instead of the long open-kettle reduction that darkened fruit and cooked the flavor flat. Grapefruit was still a comparative novelty in American kitchens in the early twentieth century, spreading north from Florida groves, and marmalade makers seized on it for exactly the quality named in the first line — the bitter that Seville oranges had traditionally supplied. Extracting that bitterness separately from the boiled pith, then throwing the pith away, is a neat piece of technique: it gives the cook control over how sharp the finished jar tastes, rather than leaving it to whatever the fruit happened to hold.