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Preserved Seville Orange
Peel the yellow rind from the fruit then halve crosswise and seed. Sprinkle the halves thickly with salt and boil fruit in soda water for at least fifteen minutes (a heaping teaspoon of soda to each quart of water). Drain and pour over the oranges fresh hot water and repeat. If the rind is not soft boil it until it is. Make a syrup of a pint of water to a pound of sugar (a pound of sugar for each pound of fruit) and when thickening well add the fruit, cooking it till translucent. Remove oranges, place in hot jars, and when syrup has cooked down till quite thick pour over the fruit while the syrup is at boiling point, filling jars pretty full. Seal well.
A whole-fruit citrus preserve in heavy syrup, of the kind that predates the modern jam standard. The instructions are terse but complete; most of what needs translating is vocabulary.
- "Soda water" is not carbonated waterIt means water with bicarbonate of soda dissolved in it — a heaping teaspoon of baking soda per quart, as the recipe says. The alkali softens the pith and strips some of the bitterness from the rind.
- The hinge: the rind must be fully tender firstOnce sugar enters, the peel stops softening and stays leathery no matter how long you cook it. Boil, drain, refresh with hot water and boil again until a piece of rind can be pierced with no resistance, however many changes of water that takes.
- Go carefully with the sodaToo much, or too long a boil, and the halves collapse into mush and take on a soapy taste. Two changes of soda water is usually plenty; use plain hot water for any further boiling.
- Rinse the salt offThe salt draws liquid from the peel and helps the bitterness leach out, and the recipe never tells you to wash it away. Much of it will dissolve into the boiling water and be poured off with the drainings, but rinsing the halves before the first boil is a sensible precaution.
- Seville orangesCitrus × aurantium, the bitter marmalade orange, sold only for a few weeks in midwinter and rarely in supermarkets. Nothing else tastes the same; a mixture of ordinary orange with some grapefruit or lemon peel comes closest in bitterness but not in aroma.
- Syrup proportionsA pint of water to a pound of sugar, with a pound of sugar for each pound of prepared fruit, exactly as the recipe states. 'Thickening well' is the recipe's own gauge and it gives no temperature or timing; the fruit goes in at that point and cooks until the peel looks glassy.
- SealingThis is open-kettle canning: hot syrup into hot jars, sealed and left. Because the preserve is both acidic and very high in sugar the risk is mould and yeast rather than anything worse, but current practice is a 10-minute boiling-water bath for half-pint and pint jars, and any jar that fails to seal goes in the refrigerator.
- Yield and useUse -- Serve the halves as a sweetmeat with cream or thick yoghurt, or chop them into cake and pudding batters; the syrup itself is worth keeping for glazing ham or duck.
Preserving bitter oranges whole or halved in heavy syrup is older than shredded marmalade, and the two techniques ran alongside each other in English and American kitchens well into the twentieth century; the Portuguese marmelada, a quince paste, is the source of the word marmalade, though its descent to whole-fruit citrus preserves is less direct than that. The Seville orange earned its place because it is almost inedible raw: high in pectin, thick-pithed and sharply bitter, it is a fruit that exists in the kitchen only as a preserve. The repeated soda boiling here is a period solution to the same problem that long soaking and cooking solves in marmalade.