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Rhubard Marmalade for Tarts
Rhubarb flavored with oranges and boiled down with sugar. 4 cupfuls of rhubarb cut very small. 2 cupfuls of sugar. 3 oranges--or orange peel only.
Grate the yellow rind of the oranges into the saucepan and then cut up the insides, carefully excluding the seeds and white pith. Put in a spoonful or two of water to wet the bottom, then the sugar and rhubarb, and simmer at the back of the range with the lid on for an hour. Keep in a jar. Use to fill tarts or spread between layers of cake.
A straightforward stovetop preserve that behaves more like a thick orange-rhubarb compote than a set jam. The instructions assume a coal range, so the heat management needs translating.
- "The back of the range"On a wood or coal stove this was the coolest zone, used for long unattended simmering. On a gas or electric hob it means the lowest setting on a small burner, in a heavy-bottomed pan, with the lid on and an occasional stir. Sugar and rhubarb catch and scorch readily once the mixture thickens.
- Stalks onlyRhubarb leaves contain oxalic acid in quantities high enough to be dangerous and should be cut off and discarded. Only the pink and green stalks go in the pan; four cupfuls sliced small is roughly a pound and a quarter of trimmed stalk.
- The orangesGrate only the coloured zest, then segment the flesh and leave behind every scrap of white pith and membrane, which turns the finished marmalade bitter over the hour of cooking.
- Sugar ratioTwo cups sugar to four cups fruit is somewhat less sugar than the equal-weight proportion usual in preserves, which may be why it stays soft and spreadable. It also means the result is not shelf-stable in the way a full-sugar jam is.
- Storage"Keep in a jar" likely implied no more than a covered vessel in a cold larder, for fairly short keeping. Treat it as a refrigerator preserve: cool, cover, chill, and use within two or three weeks. Do not treat this as a canning recipe -- there are no processing times or headspace given.
- Set and textureRhubarb is low in pectin, so expect a loose, jammy consistency rather than a firm set. If it is too slack to sit in a tart shell, uncover for the last fifteen minutes and let it reduce; it thickens noticeably as it cools.
- YieldAbout two cups, enough to fill roughly a dozen small tart shells or to fill and spread a two-layer cake.
Pastry books of this period often used "marmalade" loosely, for any fruit boiled down to a thick spreading mass, and the narrow British sense of a citrus preserve seems not yet to have displaced the older usage. Rhubarb earned its place in these books because it arrives in early spring, weeks before any other fruit, and because it was reliably cheap; nineteenth-century cooks called it pieplant, a name that says exactly what it was grown for. Pairing it with orange is practical as well as pleasant: the zest supplies aromatic oils that rhubarb lacks entirely. The same preparation could fill tartlets or be spread between cake layers.