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Lemon Marmalade
Every housekeeper should keep a large jar, or other nice vessel, filled with brine, in which she may throw lemon peels after being deprived of the grated rind and juice, used for creams, jellies, etc. These may remain any length of time, to suit one's convenience. Before preserving, soak in pure water till all the taste of salt is extracted. Boil till soft enough to pierce with a straw. Then put in a preserving kettle nine pounds cut sugar and one quart water. As soon as it boils, add six pounds lemon peel and three pounds nice sliced apples (pippins are best). Boil till very thick.--Mrs. S.T.
This is a thrift preserve built from the peels left over after other cooking, and it assumes a household working at nineteenth-century scale. The quantities need dividing before anything else.
- Scale it downNine pounds of sugar with six pounds of peel and three of apple yields roughly ten to twelve pints of marmalade. A quarter batch is more realistic: about 2 lb 4 oz sugar, 1 cup water, 1 lb 8 oz peel, 12 oz sliced apple.
- "Cut sugar"Loaf sugar broken into lumps, sold that way before granulated sugar was standard. Plain granulated white sugar is the direct equivalent, measured by weight.
- The brine jarThe recipe says only 'brine.' For peel to keep 'any length of time' it would have to be a strong salt brine rather than a light one, with the peel kept fully submerged. If you have no reason to stockpile peel, use fresh peel and skip the soaking entirely.
- Getting the salt outThis is the step that decides whether the marmalade is edible. Soak the brined peel in several changes of cold water over 12 to 24 hours and taste a sliver before proceeding; residual salt cannot be corrected later.
- Boiling the peel softSimmer in fresh water until a straw or skewer goes through with no resistance, usually 40 to 60 minutes depending on thickness. Peel that goes into sugar syrup still firm will stay leathery, because sugar sets the texture.
- Pippins'Pippin' covered a range of firm, tart varieties in this period rather than one apple; any tart, firm apple that holds acid and pectin works, Granny Smith most reliably. The apple is here for set as much as flavour, so do not leave it out.
- "Boil till very thick"Cook to the setting point, 220-222F at sea level, or until a spoonful wrinkles on a chilled plate. Stir often once it thickens; a sugar load this heavy scorches quickly.
- StorageThe recipe gives no sealing instructions, as was normal when preserves were poured into crocks and covered with paper. Follow current water-bath canning directions for jars and processing times, or simply refrigerate and use within a few weeks.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and first published in 1877, is a collection of contributions from named Virginia housekeepers, which is why this one carries only the initials "Mrs. S.T." The recipe is less a dish than a system: lemons were bought for their juice and grated zest, used in creams, jellies and puddings, and the peel was the expensive part left over. Holding it in brine until enough had accumulated to justify firing up the preserving kettle is the same logic that governed saving fat, bones and fruit parings in a kitchen where nothing imported was cheap. The word marmalade is generally traced to the Portuguese marmelada, a stiff quince paste, and only later attached in English to the citrus-peel preserves that had taken over the name by the nineteenth century. The added apple is a working cook's pectin, supplied long before pectin was sold in a box.