Home › Preserves, Marmalades, Jams, Conserves and Fruit Butters › Carrot and Orange Marmalade
Carrot and Orange Marmalade
6 carrots
I lemon
3 oranges
Sugar
Dice the carrots and cook them until they are tender, in as little water as possible. Cut the oranges in small pieces and add the juice and grated rind of the lemon. Measure the carrot and fruit, and add two-thirds as much sugar. Simmer the mixture until it is clear. Turn it into jelly glasses, and when it is cold, cover it with hot paraffin.
A wartime-thrifty preserve that stretches citrus with root vegetable. It works, but two things in the original need updating: the vague produce measurements and the paraffin seal.
- What "6 carrots" meansAssume about 1 lb of trimmed carrots, which yields roughly 3 cups diced. The recipe measures by volume after cooking anyway, so the count matters less than the sugar ratio that follows.
- Cut the citrus fine, peel includedCut the citrus fine -- the recipe says only 'small pieces,' and the only rind it calls for is grated lemon rind. If you include orange peel, shred it thin and remove seeds and the thick white pith, or the batch can turn bitter and stringy.
- Two-thirds sugar is deliberateMost marmalades run near equal parts sugar to fruit. This one is lower, which gives a softer, more spoonable set and a shorter shelf life. Do not cut it further; the sugar is doing the preserving work.
- Carrots bring no pectinCarrots bring little usable pectin -- the set comes mainly from the citrus, above all the lemon and any peel you include. Simmer any peel until it is genuinely soft before the sugar goes in, since sugar stops peel from tenderizing any further.
- "Until it is clear" is the doneness cue'Until it is clear' is the doneness cue -- roughly the point at which the syrup turns translucent and begins to sheet from a spoon; a thermometer near 220F at sea level is the usual guide for a set, though this lower-sugar mixture may not track it exactly. Expect a stretch of open simmering after the sugar dissolves, stirring near the end as it thickens and catches.
- Jelly glassesGlasses of this era commonly held 6 to 8 oz. The recipe gives no yield; with this quantity of carrot, fruit and sugar, expect several glasses rather than two or three.
- Skip the paraffinHot wax poured over jam was the standard household seal for a century, but it shrinks and pulls away from the glass as it cools, leaving channels for mold. Current practice is a boiling-water bath in proper canning jars, or simply refrigerating the jars and using the marmalade within a month.
Carrot marmalade belongs to a long tradition of stretching expensive imported citrus with something cheap and sweet from the garden. Carrots are the obvious candidate: high in sugar for a vegetable, mild in flavor, and cooked down to a texture close to fruit pulp. Carrot jam has often been described as a wartime expedient, made when sugar and fruit were rationed and carrots were not. Butterick, a pattern and magazine company writing for the practical American housekeeper, includes it in a preserving chapter.