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Quick Orange Marmalade
Remove skins in quarters from 2 oranges and 1 lemon, close to the pulp. Break up pulp and remove seeds. Add 1/2 cup water and simmer in covered saucepan for 45 minutes. Boil rind from oranges and lemons with 4 cups water in covered saucepan for 20 minutes. Drain and discard water. With sharp-edged spoon scrape out and discard white part of skins, leaving only yellow rind. With sharp knife shred yellow rinds just as thin as possible in pieces about 1 inch long. Simmer shredded rinds again in 2 1/2 cups water in covered saucepan for 15 minutes. Drain and discard water. Mix cooked pulp with rinds. Measure 2 cups of mixed rind and pulp, adding water if necessary to make up this amount. Add 3 1/2 cups sugar and mix well. Stir constantly and bring to vigorous boil over hot fire. Boil hard for 3 minutes, stirring constantly. Remove from fire, add 1/4 cup commercial pectin. Stir well. Let stand 5 minutes only, stirring occasionally. Pour into glasses.
A pectin-set marmalade built to be finished in an afternoon rather than boiled to the sheeting point over a long morning. The three separate rind boils are the part people skip and regret.
- Measure the fruit exactlyThe whole set depends on hitting precisely 2 cups of combined pulp and shredded rind against 3 1/2 cups sugar. Pack it into a dry measure and top up with water if you are short; guessing high gives a syrup that never firms.
- What "commercial pectin" means herePectin added after the boil, off the heat, is liquid pectin — the Certo-style bottled kind. Powdered pectin is stirred in at the start with the fruit and will not work in this sequence. A quarter cup is 4 tablespoons; a current 3-fl-oz pouch holds 6, so this is roughly two-thirds of a pouch.
- Why the rind is boiled three timesWhy the rind is boiled twice -- Two changes of water plus the scraping of the white pith is what keeps the marmalade from turning bitter. Skip a boil and the albedo carries through; scrape the pith down to a thin, translucent layer of colored zest before shredding.
- "Hot fire" and "boil hard"High heat, and a boil that cannot be stirred down. Three minutes at a true rolling boil is the full extent of the cooking — this is not a preserve reduced by evaporation, so resist adding time.
- The five-minute standStanding and stirring occasionally for five minutes lets the mixture cool just enough that the shreds are more likely to stay suspended rather than floating to the top of each jar.
- "Glasses"Jelly tumblers, sealed in their day with a poured paraffin cap. Paraffin sealing is no longer recommended, as the wax shrinks and admits mold; use standard canning jars and either refrigerate the marmalade, freeze it, or process it in a boiling-water bath according to current preserving guidance.
Marmalade in the British sense — a citrus preserve carrying suspended shreds of peel — is generally traced to Scotland and the bitter Seville orange, and traditionally demanded a long slow boil to extract enough natural pectin from pips and pith to set. Bottled fruit pectin, sold in the United States from around the end of the First World War, rewrote that arithmetic: with the set guaranteed from a bottle, the cook only needed to boil long enough to dissolve sugar, and "quick" jams and marmalades became a fixture of manufacturers' leaflets and general household books alike. This version, using sweet eating oranges with a lemon added for acid and bite, belongs squarely to that shift.