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Marmalade
12 Seville oranges 6 sweet oranges 10 pounds of sugar Rind and juice of 2 lemons Slice the oranges very thin, removing all seeds. Put the seeds in a small basin, and pour over them a pint of boiling water, and allow them to stand until next day. Put the sliced oranges into a stone pan with six quarts of cold water, and let them stand for twenty-four hours. Put on to boil with the strained liquid from the seeds, and boil for two hours; then add the sugar, and boil another hour or until set. This makes about fifteen pounds of marmalade.
A classic English-style whole-fruit marmalade, scaled for a Victorian storeroom. Nothing here is obsolete, but the quantities and the vague "until set" need translating.
- Scale firstTwelve Sevilles, six sweet oranges and 10 lb of sugar with six quarts of water yields about 15 lb of marmalade — roughly fifteen 1-lb jars. Halving or quartering the recipe works perfectly well and boils down faster; keep the fruit-to-sugar-to-water ratio intact.
- Seville orangesBitter Sevilles are the point of the recipe and are only in shops for a few weeks in midwinter, usually January into February. They freeze whole and can be used straight from the freezer. Ordinary sweet oranges alone will give a cloying, slack preserve.
- The seeds are the pectinSoaking the pips overnight draws out pectin, which is what sets the marmalade. Do not skip them or throw the liquid away; strain it in and discard the pips. A muslin bag holding the pips, dropped into the pan and squeezed out at the end, is easier than fishing them out.
- "A stone pan"A glazed earthenware crock, used because it did not react with acid fruit. Any non-reactive bowl or the preserving pan itself will do for the 24-hour soak. Avoid untreated aluminium or unlined copper.
- Slicing"Very thin" is the whole texture of the finished jar. Slice the peel to about 2 mm for a fine-cut marmalade, thicker if you like chunk; the long soak and the two-hour boil are what soften it, so the peel must be genuinely tender before the sugar goes in — sugar sets the rind and it will never soften afterwards.
- Testing the set"Until set" means 220F / 105C on a sugar thermometer, or the wrinkle test: a spoonful on a chilled saucer, left a minute, that wrinkles when pushed. Start testing after 15 minutes of the final boil rather than waiting the full hour — a modern high-output burner reaches setting point much faster than a coal range.
- Warm the sugarAdding 10 lb of cold sugar stops the boil dead and prolongs cooking, which darkens the marmalade. Warm it in a low oven, or add it in stages, stirring until fully dissolved before returning to a hard boil.
- JarsThe original assumes covered pots in a cold larder. Fill sterilised jars to within a quarter inch of the rim while the marmalade is still hot, seal at once, and either process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes or refrigerate once opened. Let the pan stand five minutes off the heat before potting so the peel suspends evenly instead of floating to the top.
Marmalade in English originally meant a stiff quince paste — the word comes through French from Portuguese marmelada, from marmelo, quince — and only shifted to the citrus preserve we know over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The bitter Seville orange became the standard fruit because its high pectin and acid content set reliably and its bitterness stood up to enormous quantities of sugar; the tale of a Dundee grocer salvaging a storm-stranded cargo of Spanish oranges is traditional rather than documented. That a marmalade recipe sits in a vegetarian cookery book is unremarkable: preserving was the domestic technology that carried fruit through winter, and a book aimed at meatless households needed a well-stocked store cupboard more than most. The ten pounds of sugar is a reminder of how cheap refined sugar had become by the turn of the twentieth century, and of how much of it a household expected to lay in at once.