Home › The Guava › Guava Marmalade
Guava Marmalade
Cook as for jelly, pressing through coarse sieve when soft. Cook up again with equal quantity of sugar, adding juice of one lemon to each pint of pulp. When thick place in jars.
A terse jam formula that assumes you have already read the jelly recipe on the facing page. The proportions are sound; what it leaves out is the pectin behaviour of guava and how to know when "thick" has arrived.
- "Cook as for jelly"The book is pointing back to its jelly recipe: the guavas, skins and seeds and all, are cooked with water until wholly soft. The difference comes at the next step: for jelly you would strain through a bag, whereas here you push everything but the seeds through a coarse sieve or food mill.
- The seeds are the point of the sieveGuava seeds are hard enough to crack a tooth and will not soften with any amount of cooking. A food mill with the coarse plate, or a stiff sieve worked with a wooden spoon, separates them cleanly. Do not use a blender first, which shatters the seeds into gritty fragments.
- Equal quantity of sugarThe book does not say whether by volume or weight. Taken by volume against the sieved pulp, a pint of pulp is two cups, so a pint of sugar is two cups, roughly 14 oz. This is a heavy ratio by modern taste; guava is high in both pectin and acid, so a lower proportion of sugar will often still set.
- The lemonOne lemon per pint of pulp is a lot of juice, close to three tablespoons, and it is there for acidity as much as flavour. Underripe guavas need less; very ripe or overripe fruit needs all of it to set firmly.
- Judging "thick"Guava marmalade thickens fast and scorches faster. Stir constantly over medium heat once the sugar dissolves, and stop when a spoonful dragged across the pan bottom leaves a track that closes slowly, or when a chilled saucer of it wrinkles under a fingertip. Cook past that and you have guava paste, which is a fine thing but not spreadable.
- Filling the jarsThe book says only "place in jars," which in a book of this kind implies clean hot jars filled while the marmalade is boiling hot. For anything you intend to keep at room temperature, use current practice: half-inch headspace and a boiling-water bath, 10 minutes for half-pints. Otherwise refrigerate and eat within a month.
- YieldAbout 3 lb of whole guavas gives roughly a pint of sieved pulp, which with sugar makes three to four half-pint jars.
Guava was rarely a garden fruit in most of the United States, and cookbooks often treat it alongside the tropical preserves rather than the orchard fruits. Its appeal to preservers was practical: guava carries so much natural pectin and acid that it sets with nothing but sugar, which is why the same base recipe branches into jelly, marmalade and the stiff sliceable paste sold as guava cheese or, in Spanish-speaking kitchens, pasta de guayaba. "Marmalade" here keeps its older and broader sense of a fruit pulp boiled thick with sugar, from the Portuguese marmelada, originally a quince paste; the narrowing of the word to citrus-peel preserves is a British habit. The instruction to press the pulp through a sieve, rather than strain it clear, is the only real difference between this and the jelly it points back to.