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Lemon and Apple Marmalade
See Lemon Marmalade. Cook the lemon and apple separately and allow equal parts of lemon and apple.
This is a variation note rather than a standalone recipe: it sends you back to the book's Lemon Marmalade and tells you to add an equal weight of apple. The points below fill in what the cross-reference assumes you already know.
- Read it as a ratio, not a methodThe only new information here is the proportion: equal parts cooked lemon and cooked apple, each softened on its own before they are combined. Everything else — slicing, soaking, sugar, boiling to a set — comes from the base lemon marmalade.
- Equal parts means by weightEqual parts probably means by weight -- the original does not say. Preserving books of this period commonly measure fruit pulp by weight or by the pint of cooked pulp rather than by raw volume, so weighing the two cooked pulps separately and matching them is the safer reading; a cup of shredded lemon and a cup of apple are not the same amount of fruit.
- Why cook them separatelyLemon peel needs long, slow simmering in plenty of water to go tender, and apple collapses in a fraction of that time. Cooked together, the apple turns to sauce and scorches before the peel softens. Combine only once both are soft, then add sugar.
- Apple choiceThe original does not specify. A tart, firm cooking apple (Bramley, Granny Smith, Northern Spy) suits the purpose. Slightly underripe fruit is generally higher in pectin. The peels and cores are worth keeping: tied in muslin and simmered with the apple, they add to the set.
- SugarA pound of sugar to a pound of combined cooked pulp, added after the fruit is tender, is the usual rule for preserves of this type, though this entry gives no proportion. Sugar added before the peel is soft tends to keep it tough.
- Setting pointBoil hard after the sugar dissolves and test at 220F (105C) at sea level, or use the cold-saucer wrinkle test. The added apple pectin may well bring it to a set sooner than an all-lemon marmalade, so start testing early.
- JarsPour into hot sterilised jars and, by current practice, process filled jars in a boiling-water bath for 10 minutes. This entry gives no sealing instructions.
Apple has a long history in preserving as both a stretcher and a stiffener: it is cheap, seasonal in enormous quantity, and one of the richest common sources of pectin, which is why cookbooks of this era pair it with expensive or low-set fruit. Lemon supplies the acid and the aromatic peel; apple supplies bulk and body, and the combination lets a household turn a few lemons into several jars. The word marmalade comes from the Portuguese marmelada, a stiff quince paste, and only settled into its modern English sense of a citrus-peel preserve over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with Dundee firms later doing much to fix the association with orange marmalade. Terse cross-references like this one are common in household fruit manuals, which seem to assume a cook working through the book rather than opening it at a single page.