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Orange Marmalade
Mrs. Midgley.
Nine Seville oranges, three sweet oranges, four lemons cut across the grain as finely as possible; place in a deep dish with four quarts of water; let it stand thirtysix hours; boil two hours, (water as well); then add * eight pounds of crushed sugar; boil one hour longer, or until you think it will jelly; the addition of a wineglassful of spirits when nearly boiled has the effect of causing all impurities to rise to the surface, and clarifies the jelly.
A classic three-fruit Seville marmalade, written for cooks who judged set by eye. The two things worth fixing are the long boil after the sugar goes in and the total absence of any instruction for filling and sealing jars.
- The hinge: boil to setting point, not by the clockAn hour of hard boiling after eight pounds of sugar will take most batches well past the set and into caramel and bitterness. Boil to 220F (104.5C) on a candy thermometer, or until a spoonful wrinkles on a chilled plate; on a wide pan that can happen in 20 to 40 minutes.
- Seville orangesThese are the bitter oranges, in season for only a few weeks in midwinter, roughly January into February, and their acid and pectin are hard to replace. If you cannot get them, use a current recipe built around sweet oranges rather than swapping them in here.
- Cut across the grainThis means slicing the whole fruit crosswise, peel, pith and all, into the thinnest possible rounds, then chopping them down. Save the pips and any thick membrane and tie them in muslin to soak and boil with the fruit; they carry most of the pectin and can be lifted out before the sugar goes in.
- MeasuresFour quarts of water is about 3.8 litres by US measure, or about 4.5 litres if the imperial quart is meant, as it may well be in a Canadian book of this date. A wineglassful in a book of this period is usually reckoned at about 2 fluid ounces, a quarter cup. "Crushed sugar" is loaf sugar broken down, and ordinary granulated sugar is the modern equivalent.
- The 36-hour soakThis softens the peel and draws pectin out of pips and pith before cooking. Cover the bowl and, in a warm kitchen, keep it in the refrigerator; use a non-reactive bowl, since citrus acid will pit aluminium and pick up metal from bare cast iron.
- The spiritsBrandy or whisky, added near the end so the scum lifts and can be skimmed. It is optional; a knob of butter stirred in at the end disperses foam just as well, and skimming carefully does the same job.
- Yield and sealingExpect roughly 9 to 12 pints, depending on how far it is boiled down. The recipe gives no instruction for potting at all; wax and paper covers were the usual practice of the period. Fill hot sterilised jars, leaving a quarter inch of headspace, and process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes, or refrigerate and use within a month.
Marmalade began as something closer to a solid sweetmeat: the word comes through French and Portuguese marmelada, a stiff quince paste, and only later attached itself to the loose, peel-flecked citrus preserve English and Scottish households came to expect at breakfast. The shift to bitter Seville oranges is generally traced to Scotland, and to Dundee in particular, where the trade was commercialised in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, though bitter-orange preserves were being made domestically long before any firm sold them. Recipes like this one belong to the domestic tradition rather than the commercial: The Home Cook Book, compiled in Toronto in the 1870s from contributions by named local women, credits it to Mrs. Midgley, and the imported Sevilles behind it presumably reflect the short winter window in which a Canadian household could get them at all. The instruction to judge the set by whether "you think it will jelly" is the period's whole approach in miniature: no thermometer, no pectin, just experience and a cold saucer.