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Rhubarb Marmalade
The rhubarb for marmalade should be young and fresh. Cut it into inch lengths without peeling. Weigh it and allow three-quarters of a pound of sugar to every pound of the plant. Place the sugar and the plant in a preserving-kettle, heat it very slowly and boil three-quarters of an hour, stirring constantly. Put up the same as jam.
In making marmalade or jam constant stirring is necessary from the beginning. Indeed, there is no preparation of fruit that requires so much attention during the entire process. Always use a wooden spoon, scraping the bottom of the kettle at every turn. If the fruit adheres to the bottom ever so slightly, empty the kettle at once and thoroughly cleanse it, for when once the fruit begins to adhere to the kettle it grows continually worse, and cleansing is the only sure preventive.
A two-ingredient preserve whose only difficulty is the one the original dwells on: it scorches. Everything else is a matter of translating a nineteenth-century kettle and an open-ended boiling time.
- The hinge: constant stirringRhubarb is watery at first and then very suddenly thick, and the sugar concentration at the end is high enough to catch and burn in seconds. Use a wide, heavy-bottomed non-reactive pan and a flat-edged wooden spatula that actually reaches the corners, not a rounded spoon.
- Preserving-kettleRead this as a wide, shallow, heavy pan; such kettles were commonly copper or brass in this period, and stainless or enameled cast iron now. Avoid bare aluminum or unlined copper, since rhubarb's oxalic and malic acids react with both.
- The sugar ratioThree-quarters of a pound of sugar per pound of rhubarb is roughly 1 2/3 cups sugar to each pound of trimmed stalks. Weigh rather than measure by volume; the high proportion of sugar is a large part of what helps the finished marmalade keep.
- Three-quarters of an hour is too longThree-quarters of an hour may be longer than needed -- The original timing likely suits a slower solid-fuel range and a broad pan losing water to the air. On a modern burner, rhubarb collapses in about ten minutes and the mixture should reach setting point -- 220F on a candy thermometer at sea level, or a wrinkled skin on a chilled saucer -- in roughly 20 to 30 minutes. Holding it to the full 45 minutes after that gives a darker, caramel-tasting paste.
- Let the sugar draw first"Heat it very slowly" is doing real work. Mixing the cut rhubarb with the sugar and leaving it an hour off the heat pulls out enough juice that nothing sits dry against hot metal at the start.
- Leaves and setDiscard the leaves entirely; they are high in oxalic acid and are not food. Rhubarb is also low in pectin, so expect a soft, spoonable set — the juice and grated zest of a lemon per two pounds firms it noticeably and brightens the flavor.
- "Put up the same as jam"In this period that generally meant hot jars, often sealed with a paraffin cap. Current practice is a boiling-water bath: fill clean hot half-pint jars to 1/4 inch of the rim, apply two-piece lids, and process 10 minutes, adjusting for altitude. Skip the paraffin.
- YieldTwo pounds of rhubarb with its sugar gives roughly three to four half-pint jars.
Rhubarb reached English and American kitchen gardens as a medicinal root long before it was eaten as a stem — the dried rhizome was a standard purgative traded out of China and Russia, and it is only in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that the stalks became a food crop in Britain and then North America. Its use in early-spring pies, months ahead of berries or stone fruit, is behind the nickname "pieplant." Calling the result a marmalade rather than a jam reflects the older, broader sense of the word — a fruit pulp boiled down with sugar until stiff, with no citrus implied. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns, also issued domestic manuals aimed at the same middle-class housekeeper who bought its paper patterns, and the long digression on scraping the kettle is characteristic: instruction in technique for cooks working over uneven solid-fuel heat, where scorching was the likeliest way to lose a batch.