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Lemon Marmalade
Soak six or eight ounces of lemon peel in brine for several days. Before preserving, soak the peels in pure water until the taste of the salt is entirely extracted and boil till soft enough to pierce with a straw. Place in a copper preserving-pan nine pounds of preserving-sugar and one quart of water, when boiling, put in the lemon-peel and three pounds of apples cut in slices. Stir all over the fire until very thick. When done, turn the marmalade into jars and leave till very cold. Cover them tightly and keep in a dry cupboard until wanted for use.
This is a large-scale hotel preserve built on brined citrus peel — a way of banking the peel from lemons that had already been juiced. The proportions are industrial and the storage instructions predate any understanding of processing.
- Get the salt out completelyEverything depends on the desalting soak. Change the water several times over a full day and taste the peel before it goes anywhere near sugar; salt that is still present will not cook out, and it will be locked in by nine pounds of sugar.
- Scale it downNine pounds of sugar, a quart of water, three pounds of apples and six to eight ounces of peel is a very large batch, yielding perhaps eight to ten pints. Quartering it gives a manageable pot and the same result.
- The apples are the pectinThe apples add pectin -- Use firm tart apples, unpeeled and uncored if you like, since the skins and cores carry pectin. Citrus peel and pith are pectin-rich too, but the apples give body and help the set. Do not substitute a soft sweet eating apple.
- "Very thick" means a temperatureCook to 220-222F on a candy thermometer, or until a spoonful wrinkles on a chilled plate. The original relies entirely on the cook's eye, and a preserve pulled early will not keep even at this sugar level.
- Piercing with a strawThe test for the boiled peel: a broom straw was the period's toothpick. Cook the peel until a skewer goes through with no resistance, before it meets sugar — sugar syrup will stop it softening any further.
- The copper panUnlined copper preserving pans were standard because they heat evenly and the wide mouth speeds evaporation. Prolonged contact between acid fruit and bare copper does leach metal; a wide stainless or enamelled pan does the same job.
- Storage is the weak point"Cover them tightly and keep in a dry cupboard" was adequate for a hotel turning over stock in weeks. Use sterilised jars and either a boiling-water bath following a current tested process, or simply refrigerate the filled jars and use them within a couple of months.
Oscar Tschirky's book records the working habits of the Waldorf kitchen at the turn of the twentieth century, and this entry is really a thrift measure: brine held citrus peel until there was time to preserve it. Salting citrus peel for later candying or marmalade was long-established practice in confectionery. The word marmalade comes from the Portuguese marmelada, a stiff quince paste, and only settled onto citrus preserves in English use over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the apples here are doing the quince's old job of supplying body and set, since sliced apple was a common household source of pectin before commercial pectin was sold.