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Orange and Rhubarb Marmalade
Remove peel in quarters from eight oranges and prepare as for Orange Marmalade. Divide oranges in sections, remove seeds and tough part of skin. Put into a preserving kettle, add five pounds rhubarb, skinned and cut in one-half inch pieces. Heat to boiling-point, and boil one-half hour; then add four pounds cut sugar and cut rind. Cook slowly two hours. Turn into glasses.
A long-boiled, relatively low-sugar preserve from the era of paraffin-sealed jelly tumblers. The fruit ratio and the technique both need a little translation.
- "Prepare as for Orange Marmalade"The cross-referenced recipe is where the peel is dealt with: taken off in quarters, freed of the bitter white pith, and shredded fine, and in most marmalade practice of the period softened in water first. Do that before it goes into the kettle at the sugar stage, or the shreds risk staying tough through the whole two hours.
- Stalks onlyRhubarb leaves contain enough oxalic acid to be genuinely poisonous and must never go into a preserve. Trim them off and discard; the recipe's "skinned" refers to pulling the stringy outer membrane from coarse stalks, which modern tender field rhubarb rarely needs.
- Cut sugarLoaf sugar broken into cubes, sold that way because refined sugar came in hard cones and blocks. Plain granulated is the same thing; four pounds is about nine cups.
- Preserving kettleA wide, heavy pan. Rhubarb and citrus are acid enough that bare aluminium is best avoided over a two-hour cook; stainless or enamelled is the safe modern choice.
- Judge by set, not by clockFive pounds of rhubarb plus eight oranges to four pounds of sugar is lean by preserving standards, and the two-hour cook the book asks for is doing the reducing. Start testing at about ninety minutes: 220F on a thermometer, or a spoonful that wrinkles on a chilled plate. Overcooking past that point gives a dark, caramelised marmalade.
- "Turn into glasses"These were jelly tumblers sealed with a disc of melted paraffin, a method no longer considered sound — the wax shrinks and lets mould in. Use standard canning jars and process them in a boiling water bath, or simply refrigerate and eat within a month.
Rhubarb came into American kitchens as a garden crop rather than an import, and in a northern dooryard it was among the first things up in spring — weeks ahead of any local fruit and cheap enough to use by the five-pound lot. Oranges, arriving by rail from Florida and California, did the opposite job: they supplied the pectin and bitter peel that rhubarb is low in, so the two together make a marmalade that neither makes as well alone. The long slow boil here is doing the work that added pectin does in a modern recipe. The instruction to turn it into glasses rather than jars is a useful marker of date; the screw-band mason jar existed, but tumblers sealed with paraffin were still an ordinary household way to keep a jelly or marmalade through the winter.