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Apple Marmalade
Apples with considerable flavor are best for marmalade. Wash, core, and cut apples in slices; put in kettle, add enough water to keep apples from burning. Cook slowly until mushy, press through a sieve, add equal amounts of sugar and apples, and flavor with orange or lemon juice. Cook until water is evaporated; fill glasses, and cover. All fruits may be made into marmalades by following the above directions. If the fruit lacks flavor, lemon juice, lemon rind, or ginger root may be cooked with the fruit. 4 pounds oranges Orange Marmalade No. I 4 pounds sugar boiling water Peel oranges, cut peel in quarters, cover with boiling water, and cook until tender. Drain, scrape to remove white, and cut scraped peel in shreds. Slice oranges, rejecting seeds and stringy portions; add sugar, cook slowly forty minutes; add rind, cook two hours. Pour into jars or glasses. 4 pounds oranges Orange Marmalade No. 2 6 lemons 6 pounds sugar Slice oranges and lemons in very thin slices, reject seeds, cover with sugar, and cook slowly until of a thick consistency, about two hours. Pour into jars or glasses.
Three preserves in one entry: a general method for fruit marmalade, and two orange versions that differ mainly in whether the peel is pre-cooked. The instructions assume you know when a preserve is done, which is the one thing worth pinning down.
- Judging the set"Cook until water is evaporated" means cook to the gel point, around 220F on a candy thermometer at sea level, or until a spoonful chilled on a cold saucer wrinkles when pushed. With equal weights of sugar and fruit the set will usually hold once that temperature is reached, though much depends on the fruit's own pectin and acid.
- Glasses and covering"Glasses" are straight-sided jelly tumblers, and "cover" in a book of this date usually meant a disc of melted paraffin wax poured over the surface, though the recipe does not say so. That method is no longer considered sound: the seal shrinks and admits mould. Fill modern canning jars and process in a boiling water bath according to current guidance.
- Apples unpeeledThe apple version has you core and slice but never peel; skins and cores carry pectin, and the sieve removes them afterward. Use a food mill rather than forcing pulp through a strainer by hand.
- Which orangesMarmalade No. 1, with its long boil of pre-softened peel, suits bitter Seville oranges, which are available only in late winter, though the recipe says only "oranges". Sweet navel or Valencia oranges will work but give a much milder, sweeter result; the six lemons in No. 2 supply acid a sweet orange lacks.
- Scraping the peelAfter boiling the quartered peel tender, the white pith is scraped away with a spoon before shredding, as the recipe directs. Left in quantity it makes for bitter, coarse marmalade, though a thin residue of pith contributes pectin.
- The two-hour boilTwo hours of slow cooking in a modern thin-bottomed pan will scorch. Use the widest heavy pot you have, no more than a third full, and stir often once the mixture thickens; wide surface area shortens the time considerably.
- YieldFour pounds of fruit with four pounds of sugar gives roughly eight to ten half-pint jars; No. 2, with six pounds of sugar and six lemons besides, yields considerably more. The apple marmalade, made with equal weights of sieved pulp and sugar, yields roughly a pint of finished marmalade per pound of pulp.
Lowney's Cook Book was written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like many branded cookbooks of its era it carried a full domestic curriculum alongside the chocolate recipes: preserving, meats, invalid cookery. The word marmalade descends from the Portuguese marmelada, a stiff quince paste, and only settled on citrus in Britain, where Seville oranges were worked up into the shredded-peel style now taken as standard, an association particularly strong in Scotland. The two orange recipes here preserve a real division of technique: one boils the peel separately until tender before shredding, while the second simply slices whole fruit thin and lets a long cook do the softening.