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Kumquat Jam or Marmalade
The fruit left from jelly may be used, adding no water, and sugar, pound for pound, with a little lemon juice, or the fresh, sliced kumquats, may be used, cooked till tender, then sugar added, retaining or not the juice, as liked. The fruit may be put through a colander or left in the original slices. Cook down to consistency liked.
This is a method rather than a formula — the book assumes you already have kumquats on the stove and a scale on the counter. The only fixed ratio it gives is sugar pound for pound with fruit.
- "The fruit left from jelly"This refers to the spent pulp and peel strained out after making kumquat jelly, which still carries flavour and body. Because that pulp is already saturated with liquid, the instruction to add no water follows.
- Pound for poundWeigh the drained fruit and match it with an equal weight of granulated sugar. This is the ratio the recipe attaches to the jelly pulp; for fresh kumquats it says only "sugar added," leaving the amount to the cook.
- Cook the peel first, sugar afterThe hinge of the recipe. Kumquat skin tends to stay tough once sugar goes in, so simmer the sliced fruit in a little water until a slice crushes easily against the pan — 20 to 30 minutes — and only then add the sugar.
- SeedsKumquats carry a few seeds each and they are bitter when crushed. Pick them out as you slice, or tie them in muslin and simmer them with the fruit, where they will contribute pectin, and lift them out before the sugar goes in.
- "Cook down to consistency liked"Judge it at 220°F on a thermometer, or by the cold-saucer test — a spoonful chilled a minute should wrinkle when pushed. Kumquats set readily, so start testing after about 15 minutes of hard boiling with the sugar.
- Colander or slicesPushing the cooked fruit through a colander gives a thick opaque marmalade; leaving the rounds whole gives translucent slices. Either way keep the pan wide and stir often once the sugar is in.
- The lemon juiceNot for flavour so much as acid, which helps the pectin set. Two tablespoons per 2 lb of fruit is ample; more if you are using the already-boiled jelly pulp, which has given up some of its own.
- StoringThe book assumes jars sealed hot and eaten through the winter. Either process filled half-pints in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes, or treat it as a refrigerator preserve and use it within a month.
Kumquats reached American gardens through Chinese and Japanese imports in the nineteenth century and took hold quickly in Florida and along the Gulf Coast. They are the citrus whose proportions are inverted — the peel is sweet and the pulp sharp — which makes them a natural marmalade fruit, since the peel needs no long candying to be palatable. The frugality on display here is characteristic of the genre: the pulp strained out of yesterday's jelly is not waste but the beginning of today's second preserve, a habit that reflects both the seasonal glut of a dooryard tree and a household economy in which sugar was the expensive part, not the fruit.