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Grape Fruit Marmalade
4 pounds grape fruit 4 pounds sugar Wash grape fruit, slice thinly, remove seeds and pulpy portion, add sugar, and cook slowly two or three hours. Pour into glasses and cover. 4 pounds peaches
Two ingredients, equal weights, and a long slow cook — this is marmalade at its most stripped-down. The stray "4 pounds peaches" at the end is the first line of the next recipe, caught by the typesetter; ignore it.
- What to keep and what to discard"Remove seeds and pulpy portion" is ambiguous, but in preserving recipes of this period it most likely means the seeds and the coarse membrane and core rather than all the flesh. Slice the whole fruit thinly, peel and all, then pick out the pips and the tough white centre column. The peel and the pith carry the pectin and the bitterness that make it marmalade.
- It needs water and a soakAs written there is no liquid at all, and grapefruit peel will not soften in its own juice. Cover the sliced fruit with about 4 cups of water and let it stand overnight, then cook the fruit until the peel is tender before the sugar goes in. Sugar added early sets the peel and it will stay leathery no matter how long it boils.
- Equal weightsFour pounds of fruit to four pounds of sugar (about 9 cups) is the classic 1:1 marmalade ratio, and it is what makes the preserve keep. Cutting the sugar substantially gives a looser, more perishable product.
- Two or three hours is for a slack fireOn a coal range at a bare simmer that timing is reasonable. On a gas burner in a wide heavy pan, expect the sugar stage to take 30 to 60 minutes. Cook to a set rather than to the clock.
- Testing the setSetting point is 220F at sea level, or 8F above the boiling point of water where you are. The saucer test still works: a spoonful chilled on a cold plate should wrinkle when pushed with a fingertip.
- "Pour into glasses and cover"In a book of this date this most often meant jelly tumblers sealed with a disc of melted paraffin, a method no longer considered a sound seal — the wax shrinks and lets mould in. Use standard canning jars and either process 10 minutes in a boiling water bath or skip processing and keep the jars in the refrigerator.
- Skim and stir near the endGrapefruit throws a good deal of foam. Skim it as it rises, and stir constantly once the mixture thickens; the peel sinks and scorches quickly at that stage.
- YieldEight pounds of fruit and sugar gives roughly 4 to 5 pints once it is boiled down. Let the filled jars stand five minutes before sealing and give them a gentle turn so the peel distributes instead of floating to the top.
Grapefruit was still something of a novelty when this book appeared in 1907. It had been planted commercially in Florida only in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and through the 1890s and 1900s it moved from curiosity to fashionable breakfast fruit in American hotels and city households — which is exactly why a preserving chapter of the period would bother to include it alongside the long-established quince, currant and peach. The word marmalade itself comes from the Portuguese marmelada, a stiff quince paste; the shift in English usage toward a citrus preserve suspended with shreds of peel is generally traced to Scottish practice with Seville oranges in the eighteenth century. Lowney's Cook Book was written by Maria Willett Howard and published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, which accounts for the book's unusual density of chocolate recipes and for the plain, unfussy style of everything else in it.