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Orange Marmalade
Twelve pounds sour oranges, twelve pounds crushed sugar; wash the oranges and pare them as you would apples; put the peel in a porcelain-lined kettle with twice its bulk or more of cold water; keep it covered, and boil until perfectly tender; if the water boils away, add more; the peel is generally very hard, and requires several hours boiling; cut the oranges in two crosswise, and squeeze out the juice and the soft pulp, have a pitcher with a strainer in the top, place in a two-quart bowl, squeeze the thin juice and seeds in the strainer and the rest with the pulp in the bowl, drawing the skin as you squeeze it over the edge of the tin strainer, to scrape off the pulp, then pour all the juice and pulp on the sugar; the white skins must be covered with three quarts of cold water, and boiled half an hour, drain the water on the sugar, put the white skins in the colander, four or five together, and pound off the soft part, of which there must be in all two pounds and four ounces, put this with the sugar and juice; when the peel is tender drain it from the water, and choose either of these three modes: Pound it in a mortar, chop it in a bowl, or cut it in delicate shreds with a pair of scissors. There is still another way, which saves the necessity of handling the peel after it is boiled; it is to grate the yellow rind from the orange, then tie it in a muslin bag, and boil until soft, which you can tell by rubbing a little of it between the thumb and finger; it is then ready for the other ingredients; put the whole in a porcelain kettle, or in a bright tin preserving-pan, and boil about an hour; when it begins to thicken it must be tried occasionally, by letting a little cool in a spoon laid on ice. To prevent its burning, pass the spoon often over the bottom of the kettle; when it is thick as desired put it in tumblers and cover with paper. - Mrs. Elizabeth S. Miller in "In the Kitchen."
A full-scale Victorian preserving day: twelve pounds of fruit and twelve of sugar will fill something like a dozen pint jars. The method is unusual in that it extracts pectin deliberately from the pith, which is why the quantities of white skin are weighed so carefully.
- Sour orangesThese are Seville or bitter oranges, in season roughly January to February. Ordinary navel or Valencia oranges have far less pectin and acid and will not set the same way; if you substitute them, expect a looser preserve and add lemon juice.
- Scale it downTwelve pounds of fruit and twelve of sugar yields somewhere near 12-14 pints. A quarter batch (3 lb oranges, 3 lb sugar) fits a normal 8-quart pot and still gives a good depth of liquid for boiling.
- "Crushed sugar"Loaf sugar broken down for use, equivalent to modern granulated white sugar. The pound-for-pound ratio with fruit is what preserves the marmalade; do not reduce it much.
- The white skinsThis is the albedo, the spongy pith between peel and flesh. Boiling it and pounding the softened part off is a pectin extraction, and the specified 2 lb 4 oz for a 12 lb batch is roughly what the recipe relies on for the set. Leave it out and expect a looser preserve.
- VesselsA porcelain-lined kettle means enamelled cast iron or, today, stainless steel. The "bright tin preserving-pan" was ordinary equipment when this was written, but modern tinware is not made for this kind of long boiling, so use stainless. Never use bare aluminium or unlined copper for citrus.
- Peel timingThe recipe warns that the peel is generally very hard and needs several hours of covered boiling, and it must be fully soft before the sugar goes in. Sugar sets the peel and no amount of later boiling will soften it.
- Testing the setThe cooled-spoon test corresponds to about 220-222F (104-106C) at sea level, or a wrinkling skin on a chilled saucer. The final boil after the sugar goes in is usually 20-40 minutes at a good rolling boil rather than a full hour; go by temperature.
- SealingPaper covers over tumblers were the standard of the day and depend on a thick sugar layer to keep mould out. Use clean canning jars with two-piece lids and process 10 minutes in a boiling water bath, or refrigerate and eat within a month.
Marmalade in English originally meant a stiff quince paste, from the Portuguese marmelo, quince; the shift to the bitter-orange preserve we now mean happened in Britain over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the Scottish trade, Dundee in particular, is usually credited with making the shredded-peel version standard. The dependence on Seville oranges is what makes this a winter recipe: bitter oranges arrived in a short season and were preserved because they are almost unusable fresh. The recipe is attributed here to Mrs. Elizabeth S. Miller's In the Kitchen (1875). Miller's careful weighing of the pith shows a working understanding, arrived at by observation rather than theory, of what makes the preserve set.