Recipes
SCOTCH ORANGE MARMALADE No. I The juice and grated rind of one lemon must be used to every four pounds of oranges and the juice of two sweet oranges to every pound of bitter or Seville oranges. Pare the fruit as thin as possible and cut the peel into very small strips. Then quarter the oranges, removing seeds, and place in the preserving kettle with only sufficient water to cover them. Squeeze with the hand until the heat is too great, then press with a wooden spoon through a fine sieve. Add the chipped rind and a pound of sugar to each pint of juice.
SCOTCH ORANGE MARMALADE No. 2 To two pints of chopped Seville oranges (pulp, rind, and juice), add two pounds of yellow honey and cook down to proper consistency.
WILD ORANGE MARMALADE (Florida Recipe No. 1) Peel and cut up the oranges and place in fresh water for twenty-four hours, then in salt water for the same time and again in fresh water, changing the water several times during the last twenty-four hours to remove all trace of the bitter tone. (If the bitterness is liked soak only as long as desired.) Use equal weight of sugar and fruit with only sufficient water to keep from burning when placed on the fire. Cook until rind is soft before adding sugar, then cook down as desired and place in heated jars. Seal.
WILD ORANGE MARMALADE (Florida Recipe No. 2) Wash and quarter the oranges, then pull off the peel and soak the latter in brine over night. In the morning place in THE WILD "SOUR," OR SEVILLE ORANGE 207 fresh water and bring to a boil, pouring off the water and replacing with fresh if still too salt or bitter. Remove white pulp with a spoon, shred fine or chop the yellow shells remaining and cook in preserving kettle. In separate vessels have the pulp and juice cooking. When peel is tender cook the two portions in one kettle and when perfectly translucent add sugar, pound for pound. A few moments only will be necessary to cook to proper consistency after this preparation. Sweet and sour oranges may be used half and half.
Four variations on the same idea, written for cooks who knew marmalade by feel rather than by thermometer. The hinge is the pectin: bitter oranges are loaded with it in their pips and pith, so nothing else needs adding, but the sugar must go in only after the peel is fully soft.
- Peel first, sugar lastIn the two Florida versions the shredded rind must be tender before sugar enters the pot (Scotch No. 1 adds rind and sugar together, and No. 2 cooks everything with the honey from the start). Sugar sets the cell walls of the peel and it will stay leathery no matter how long you boil it afterwards.
- Seville orangesThe bitter or Seville orange has a short season, roughly January into February, and is sold at good greengrocers or online. It is not interchangeable with a navel orange; if you substitute sweet oranges you lose both the acid and much of the pectin, and the set will suffer.
- The proportion in No. 1A pound of sugar to each pint of juice is close to modern practice. Weigh the sugar rather than measuring it by volume.
- "Squeeze with the hand until the heat is too great"This simply means working the softened quarters apart in the warming kettle before pressing them through a sieve. Use a spoon or a potato masher from the start.
- The honey versionNo. 2 sets less firmly than a sugar marmalade and browns faster over heat, since honey scorches at a lower temperature. Keep the flame low and stir the base of the pan.
- "Wild orange"The Florida recipes mean the naturalised sour orange that grew semi-wild across the state, essentially the same fruit as the Seville. The long soaking in fresh and salt water leaches out bitterness the cook does not want; skip or shorten it if you like a bitter marmalade.
- Cook down to proper consistencySetting point is 220F on a sugar thermometer, or the wrinkle test on a chilled saucer. Marmalade thickens considerably as it cools, so stop before it looks thick in the pan.
- Sealing"Place in heated jars. Seal." leaves the method unstated; period practice would have been a wax or inverted-jar seal. For shelf storage, process filled half-pint jars in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes; otherwise keep the jars in the refrigerator and use within a couple of months.
- YieldBecause No. 1 measures sugar against however much juice you extract, and the water is only "sufficient to cover," the yield cannot be predicted closely; expect several half-pint jars from four pounds of oranges, depending on how far you reduce it.
Marmalade of bitter oranges became a Scottish specialty in the eighteenth century, and Dundee in particular built an export trade on it over the nineteenth; the often-repeated story of a Dundee grocer buying a distressed cargo of Seville oranges is traditional rather than documented. What made it Scottish was the chip-cut peel suspended in a clear, sharply bitter jelly, as against the smoother Portuguese marmelada of quinces from which the word descends. The Florida recipes here show the same technique meeting a different fruit: sour orange trees, brought by the Spanish and long since naturalised in the state, produced quantities of fruit too bitter to eat out of hand, and the days-long soaking in fresh and salt water was the household answer to that. Printing all four side by side is characteristic of a fruit-focused compilation of this era, which collected regional variants rather than settling on one authoritative method.