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Lemon Marmalade
To six pounds of lemons take nine pounds of sugar.
Peel the lemons, then cover yellow parings with water and boil until tender. Drain and let cool, then shred fine the parings. Meantime halve the peeled fruit crosswise and press out juice and soft pulp. Cover the shells of white pulp remaining with three pints of cold water and boil one-half hour. Strain off this liquor and add it to the juice and soft pulp, with the yellow rinds. Boil all together ten minutes, then add heated sugar; boil down to desired consistency and place, while boiling hot, in small jars or marmalade pots.
LEMON JELLY No. I (Without Gelatine) It is usually considered impossible to make lemon jelly without gelatine but by the following process the apparently impossible may be achieved. Small quantities are best managed and most successful in results. Slice four lemons very thin and cover (in granite kettle) with two quarts of cold water. Cook down to one-half the quantity and strain, squeezing skin and pulp as well as juice through a coarse cheesecloth bag. Cook again and when at boiling point strain a second time but through a fine bag. Return juice to kettle and after ten minutes' simmering add hot sugar in proportion of one heaping pint to one scant pint of juice. Boil until sugar melts and it jells, which should require but five or six minutes. The result is a light tender jelly which will acquire firmness by being set in the hot sun several days in succession.
A second method is to proceed as above, with the addition of uncooked "pie-melon" pulp (half and half with the lemon in weight), using sugar in proportionate addition.
LEMON JELLY No. 2 (With Gelatine) Soak one box of gelatine (American brands preferably) in one pint of cold water for an hour, when add one quart of boiling water and two cups of sugar. Stir until gelatine is thoroughly dissolved. When cool add the juice of four lemons and strain through coarse cotton cloth into glasses or other moulds when partly cool, setting on ice to harden. This may be more tart than desired; if so add sugar just at the last. In warm weather if ice is unavailable use but one pint of hot water.
Three related preparations, all built on the same principle: lemons give up pectin from their pith and membranes, and sugar does the rest. The instructions assume a cook who knows what a set looks like, so the numbers below fill in what the original leaves unsaid.
- Use unwaxed lemonsThe whole yellow peel goes into the marmalade and into Jelly No. 1, so supermarket fruit coated in carnauba or shellac is a poor choice. Scrub hard in hot water at minimum, or buy unwaxed.
- Where the set comes fromThe half-hour boil of the stripped white shells in three pints of water is the pectin extraction, not a cleaning step. Shorten or skip it and a firm set becomes much harder to reach.
- "Desired consistency" means 220FSetting point for a high-sugar preserve is 220F/105C at sea level, roughly 8F above the boiling point of water where you live. A cold-saucer test works equally well: a spoonful on a chilled plate should wrinkle when pushed.
- Heated sugarSugar was warmed in the oven so it would not check the boil when added. Fifteen minutes in a low oven on a sheet pan does it; otherwise add the sugar in two or three lots off a hard boil.
- Granite kettleAn enamelled or graniteware pan. Any non-reactive heavy pot answers today: stainless or enamelled cast iron. Bare aluminium and unlined copper will react with this much citric acid.
- Filling the potsHot-filling small jars is period practice and works because sugar and acid are both high, but the seal is not sterile. Either water-bath process filled half-pints 10 minutes, or treat the jars as refrigerator preserves and eat them within a couple of months.
- Setting jelly in the sunDays of sun on open glasses was how a slack jelly was firmed by evaporation. It is not a method to revive; boil to a proper set instead, and if the jelly stays loose, sell it to yourself as lemon syrup.
- Pie-melonThe citron or preserving melon, a hard white-fleshed melon grown specifically for preserves. It contributes bulk and a neutral flesh that takes on the lemon, not flavour of its own. Unripe honeydew is the nearest thing now sold, and the substitution is imperfect.
- A box of gelatineAbout one ounce of granulated gelatine, which is four modern quarter-ounce envelopes, set against the pint of cold and quart of boiling water the recipe calls for.
- YieldSix pounds of lemons with nine pounds of sugar makes a large batch. Halving it is sensible for a home stove, since a shallow wide pan reduces faster and scorches less.
Marmalade began as something else entirely: the word comes from the Portuguese marmelada, a stiff quince paste, and only in Britain did it migrate to citrus and to a looser, shred-suspended preserve. Seville orange marmalade dominated the British trade, but American cookery books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were fond of lemon versions, in part because lemon pith is exceptionally rich in pectin, which made a dependable set before anyone sold pectin in a bottle. That is the point of Jelly No. 1's boast about achieving the apparently impossible: the pectin is already in the fruit, it just has to be boiled out of the skins. The gelatine version belongs to a newer world. Packaged granulated gelatine, sold in boxes of measured strength, reached American kitchens in the 1890s and made moulded desserts a weeknight matter rather than a project involving calves' feet. The author's aside preferring American brands is a small window on the period's anxieties about imported and adulterated foodstuffs, a live concern in the years around the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act.