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Lemon Marmalade
3 lbs. lemons 2 quarts (8 cups) water 2 oranges Sugar Wipe the lemons and the oranges carefully. Pare the skin very thinly from the lemons and the oranges, and cut them up into slender chips. Put the chips on to boil in a saucepan, with three cupfuls of the water, allow to cook for forty minutes. Now take all the white part from the lemons and the oranges and cut up all the pulp roughly; put this into a large casserole or earthenware dish with the remainder of the water to cook slowly for one and a quarter hours. Stir it frequently; then strain it through a hot jelly bag without pressure. Add the chips and the liquid to the strained juice. Now measure this liquid, and for each cupful allow one pound of sugar. Return to the casserole, and boil slowly for half an hour.
Put into jars and seal for use.
A two-pot marmalade: the peel is softened separately while the pulp gives up its juice, and the two are married before sugaring. Read the sugar ratio carefully before you start.
- The sugar ratio is the thing to checkOne pound of sugar to each cupful of liquid is roughly double the standard preserving proportion, which is a pound to a pint (2 cups) of juice. At the printed rate the mixture will be very sweet and prone to crystallising in the jar.
- "Casserole" means the potHere a casserole is the cooking vessel itself, a lidded flameproof earthenware pot used on the stovetop, not a baked dish. Any heavy non-reactive preserving pan or wide stainless pot does the same job; avoid bare aluminium or copper with this much citrus acid.
- Pith and pipsThe instruction to "take all the white part" reads as removing the pith, but it is genuinely ambiguous in the original. The pith and seeds are where most of the pectin lives, so tie them in a square of muslin and simmer them with the pulp, then lift the bag out before straining.
- Pare thinly, and mean itOnly the coloured zest should go into the chips. Any pith carried along makes the shreds tough and the finished marmalade bitter, and forty minutes of boiling will not soften a thick cut.
- Strain without pressureSqueezing the jelly bag pushes fine solids through and clouds the set. Let it drip, which can take an hour or more, and hang it somewhere it will not be knocked.
- How to know when it is doneHalf an hour is a guide, not a rule. Boil to setting point, 220F/105C on a sugar thermometer at sea level, or until a spoonful chilled on a cold saucer wrinkles when pushed.
- Sealing"Seal for use" in this period meant a paraffin-wax cap or a screwed lid on a hot jar. Current practice is to fill sterilised jars to within a quarter inch, cap, and process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes, then check the seals before storing.
- YieldThe recipe does not state a yield, and how much water boils away is unpredictable, so expect somewhere in the region of six half-pint jars at the conventional pound-to-pint sugaring, and more at the ratio as printed.
Marmalade began as something firmer and stranger than the shreddy preserve here: the word comes from the Portuguese marmelada, a stiff quince paste (marmelo is quince), which reached Britain in the sixteenth century as a sliceable sweetmeat. Citrus versions took over in the eighteenth century, and the Scottish habit of coarse-cut bitter orange marmalade for breakfast is generally traced to Dundee, though the founding story attached to the Keiller family is traditional rather than documented. Lemon marmalade is the thriftier cousin, and the pair of oranges here are working as a flavour corrective to the sharper lemons. Its presence in a casserole-cookery book reflects what those fireproof earthenware pots were actually good at: long, slow, even simmering over a low flame without scorching, exactly what softening peel and drawing juice from pulp requires.