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Preservation of Fruit and Vegetables by Canning, Etc: Marmalade
GRAPEFRUIT MARMALADE Take six grapefruit and four lemons; cut each fruit in quarters and slice the quarters through pulp and rind as thin as possible, discarding all seeds. Weigh the prepared fruit, and to each pound add three pints of cold water. Set aside for twenty-four hours. Let boil gently until the rind is perfectly tender, then set aside until the next day. Weight the material and to each pound add one pound of sugar. Let cook until it thickens slightly on a cold dish. The mixture will thicken still more on cooling and care must be taken not to cook it too much. Stir occasionally, while cooking, to avoid burning. Store as jelly. With a small, hard-wood board upon which to rest the fruit, and a thin, sharp knife, the slicing is quickly done. Use all the water designated.
ORANGE MARMALADE Substitute one dozen oranges for the grapefruit and follow the recipe for grapefruit marmalade.
APPLE MARMALADE Pare, quarter and core the apples and put over the fire with just enough water to keep the fruit from burning; cover closely and let cook until soft; press through a colander. Measure the pulp and allow three-fourths a cup of sugar to each cup of pulp. Stir and cook until when tested on a cold saucer the mixture does not separate. Often a lemon or an orange is used to each one or two pounds of apple. Slice as for orange marmalade, discarding the seeds; let cook in water to cover until the peel is tender, then add to the apple pulp. PEACH MARMALADE Prepare in the same manner as apple marmalade.
APPLE BUTTER 1/2 peck of sour apples Cider, fresh or boiled 1 quart of sliced sweet apples Spices to taste Pare, quarter, core and slice the sour apples; add the sweet apples. Weight the apples and take sugar equal to half the weight of the apples. Add cider until it comes nearly to the top of the apples and let cook, stirring occasionally with a perforated paddle that comes for the purpose or with a slitted wooden spoon. When the apples are soft and well broken up, add the sugar and spice in quantity as desired and stir constantly until of the consistency of marmalade. Water may take the place of the cider. Cinnamon, mace, nutmeg and cloves one or more are the spices usually selected. Peach or plum butter is made in the same way.
A cluster of preserves built on two old ratios: equal weights of sugar to cooked fruit for marmalade, half the weight of sugar for apple butter. Nothing here needs modernising except the vessels, the sealing, and the scale.
- Read "weight" as "weigh"The verb is a printer's slip that repeats twice. You weigh the sliced fruit before soaking, and weigh the softened mass again after the first boil, because much of the water has gone.
- The water is not a mistakeThree pints per pound of sliced citrus looks extravagant, but rind needs plenty of liquid to soften over two days, and much of it boils off. The recipe is explicit that all the water designated should be used.
- Sugar goes in after the peel is tenderThis is the hinge in all the citrus versions. Sugar firms rind and stops it softening further, so any peel still chewy when the sugar hits will stay chewy in the jar.
- The cold-dish testChill a couple of saucers first. A spoonful dropped on a cold plate should wrinkle when pushed and not run back together; on a thermometer this is about 220F at sea level. The warning against overcooking is sound, since marmalade sets considerably as it cools.
- Half a peck of applesA peck is 8 dry quarts, so half a peck of sour apples is about 5 to 6 lb, plus a quart of sliced sweet apples on top of that. "Sour apples" means a tart cooking variety such as Bramley, Granny Smith or Northern Spy.
- Apple butter takes hoursThe original assumes a heavy kettle and an afternoon of stirring with a slotted paddle so the paddle does not drag. A wide pan, low heat and frequent scraping of the bottom are what keep it from scorching once it thickens.
- Storage has moved on"Store as jelly" would, in this period, have meant hot jars sealed with melted paraffin, a practice no longer recommended because the wax seal can crack and admit mould. Fill clean hot jars, leave a quarter-inch of headspace and process in a boiling-water bath, or refrigerate what you will eat within a month.
Marmalade in the British sense is a citrus preserve set with the fruit's own pectin, and the technique is generally traced to Scotland, where bitter Seville oranges landed at Dundee and other east-coast ports each winter and were worked up into sliced-peel conserves. Grapefruit marmalade is a much later and largely American variation: commercial grapefruit growing in Florida and Texas expanded sharply around the turn of the twentieth century, and cookbooks of the 1900s and 1910s begin treating the fruit as an everyday breakfast item rather than a curiosity. The apple butter at the end of the page belongs to a different tradition entirely, a Pennsylvania German and mid-Atlantic autumn practice of boiling down cider with sliced apples for hours in an open copper kettle, stirred with a long perforated paddle of exactly the sort mentioned here. That such large-batch preserving instructions appear in a book called Cooking for Two says a good deal about the period: even a small household expected to put up its own fruit for the year.