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Rhubarb Marmalade No. 2
4 pounds rhubarb 6 pounds sugar 4 lemons (juice and rind) 3 ¾ cup walnuts.
Cook very carefully for a few minutes, stirring all the while till there is some juice formed. Add walnuts just before taking from fire. Cook 15 minutes.
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A high-sugar rhubarb preserve with lemon and walnuts, written in the telegraphic style of a contributed recipe. A few of its numbers need interpreting before you start.
- The walnut measure is a misprintThe walnut measure may be a misprint -- "3 ¾ cup walnuts" could be a stray figure before ¾ cup. Three and three-quarter cups of nuts is a great deal even for a batch this size, though not impossible; ¾ to 1 cup of coarsely chopped walnuts is the safer reading if you are unsure.
- Sugar ratioSix pounds of sugar to four pounds of trimmed rhubarb is heavier than modern practice, roughly 1.5:1 by weight. That is what sets it without added pectin and what preserves it; reducing the sugar substantially will give you a loose sauce that keeps poorly.
- Draw the juice firstThe instruction to "cook very carefully for a few minutes, stirring all the while till there is some juice formed" is the hinge. Dry sugar over direct heat scorches before the rhubarb weeps. Simpler and safer is to combine rhubarb, sugar and lemon and leave them to stand an hour or overnight; the syrup forms on its own and you can bring the pan straight up to a boil.
- Stalks onlyRhubarb leaves contain high levels of oxalic acid and are not eaten. Trim them off and use the stalks alone, cut in half-inch pieces; there is no need to peel.
- Lemon rindUse the zest only, finely pared or grated, not the white pith, which is bitter. Four lemons give both the acid that helps the set and the marmalade character the name refers to.
- Fifteen minutes is a guide, not a ruleJudge by temperature or by the wrinkle test on a chilled saucer rather than the clock. A rolling boil to 220F (104C) at sea level gives a set; thin rhubarb may need a few minutes longer than fifteen.
- Nuts lastAdding the walnuts just before the pan comes off the heat keeps them from softening and from clouding the preserve. They will also go rancid faster than the jam, so plan on eating this within a few months.
- Yield and keepingThis makes a large quantity; ten pounds of fruit and sugar with only a short boil will fill considerably more than a dozen half-pint jars. The recipe gives no potting or sealing instruction at all; current practice is a five- to ten-minute boiling-water bath for shelf storage, or refrigeration if you skip that step.
- Ignore the barrelThe paragraph about coopers and wire hoops is advertising copy for Five Roses flour, printed at the foot of the page. It has nothing to do with the marmalade.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Keewatin in the 1910s and built largely from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives who used the company's flour — which is why entries like this one arrive numbered, unattributed and stripped to the barest instructions, as though copied from a card. Rhubarb earned its place in the preserving chapter by being the first thing out of a northern garden, ready weeks before any true fruit, and old cookbooks treat it frankly as a substitute: "pie plant," sweetened hard enough to pass for something else. Calling the result a marmalade rather than a jam points to the lemon rind suspended in it, a preserve carrying shreds of citrus peel. The advertising paragraph tacked onto the end is a reminder of what these books were for: the recipes were free, the flour was not.