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Plum Marmalade
Cut twenty-five pounds fine, sound egg or other plums in halves, remove stones, place in saucepan with a teaspoon cinnamon, handful granulated sugar, quart cold water, cover pan, let boil until soft, stirring quite frequently meanwhile, remove and press plums through sieve into an earthen basin. Place in a copper basin three-quarters of a pound granulated sugar to every pound of plum juice, add two gills cold water, cook on brisk fire for ten minutes, add plum puree, and constantly stir while cooking for twelve minutes. Remove, place marmalade in stone jars, let thoroughly cool, cover with wax paper lightly dipped in brandy, tightly cover jars, place in cool place and it will be ready for use.
A large-batch European preserve written for a professional kitchen: twenty-five pounds of plums is roughly a bushel crate. Almost everything here scales down cleanly by a factor of ten.
- Scale it downDivide by ten for a home batch: 2 1/2 lb plums, a scant teaspoon cinnamon, a small handful of sugar, and about 1/2 cup water (a tenth of the original quart) for the first cooking. The second stage stays proportional at 3/4 lb sugar per pound of sieved puree.
- Two gillsA gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup of cold water.
- Egg plumsAn old market name for the large oval plums of the Prunus domestica group, the sort sold as yellow egg plum. Any firm, tart plum will do; the juicier Japanese types (Prunus salicina) tend to set less firmly.
- The copper basinAn unlined copper preserving pan was standard because it heats fast and evenly and the wide mouth speeds evaporation. A wide, heavy stainless or enamelled pan does the same job. Do not use unlined copper for long acidic cooking today; a broad Dutch oven is the practical substitute.
- "Brisk fire" and the timingsBrisk means full heat. The ten minutes of boiling sugar syrup and twelve minutes with the puree are indicative, not absolute — they assume a huge shallow copper pan. Cook until the marmalade sheets from the spoon or reaches about 220F, and stir constantly, since a thick fruit puree scorches the moment it catches.
- SievingPressing the softened plums through a sieve removes the skins, which is what makes this a marmalade in the older sense — a smooth fruit paste rather than a chunky jam. A food mill with the medium plate is faster than a sieve and does not shred the skins into the pulp.
- Stone jars and brandy paperA round of waxed paper dipped in spirit, laid directly on the cooled surface, was the pre-canning defence against surface mould. It works, but only for a genuinely cool, dark larder and short keeping. For anything longer, fill hot into sterilised jars and process in a boiling water bath, or refrigerate and eat within a few weeks.
- YieldThe full recipe makes an enormous quantity — well over twenty pounds of finished marmalade. The scaled-down version gives several half-pint jars.
Filippini wrote for hotel and restaurant kitchens, and the scale here shows it: twenty-five pounds of fruit at a time, a copper basin, and stone jars set aside in the cool room for the season. The word marmalade in a book of this period still carried its older, broader sense — from the Portuguese marmelada, a stiff quince paste — meaning any fruit cooked to a smooth mass with sugar, not specifically a citrus preserve. Sieving out the skins and holding the sugar at three-quarters the weight of the fruit sits at the lower end of the range usual in French confiture, where proportions commonly run from three-quarters to equal weights of sugar to fruit — high enough that the sugar itself does the preserving. The wax paper dipped in brandy is an old British and Continental household trick, generally credited with keeping mould off the surface of jams in the years before reliable sealed jars and water-bath processing became routine in the domestic kitchen.