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Raspberry Marmalade
Thoroughly pick twenty-five pounds sound, ripe raspberries, press through sieve into a basin, place same amount granulated sugar in a copper vessel, adding a gill cold water and vanilla stick. Cook over a brisk fire for six minutes, add the strained raspberries, continually stir while briskly cooking for fifteen minutes, take up vanilla bean, wipe and replace in sugar, remove marmalade, place in stone jars and let thoroughly cool. Place pieces of wax paper lightly dipped in brandy over marmalade, tightly cover jars, place in cool place and use as directed.
A hotel-scale seedless raspberry preserve, written for a kitchen that put up fruit by the barrel. The proportions are sound at any size, but the quantities, the vessel and the storage method all need translating.
- Scale it downTwenty-five pounds of berries with an equal weight of sugar is a very large batch. Note that the sugar is measured against the whole berries, not against the sieved pulp, which weighs less once the seeds are out. The ratio is what matters, with a gill of water to start the sugar. Two pounds of berries and two pounds of sugar is a manageable domestic batch.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. At full scale that is a trivial amount of water for twenty-five pounds of sugar, and it is meant only to keep the sugar from catching before it liquefies.
- The copper vesselUnlined copper preserving pans conduct evenly and were standard in professional kitchens, but acidic fruit sitting in bare copper picks up metal. Use a wide stainless or enamelled pan; width matters more than material because evaporation drives the set.
- Press through a sieveRemoving the seeds leaves a smooth pulp, which sits closer to the French sense of marmelade, fruit cooked down to a purée, than to a seeded jam; the distinction was never rigid. A food mill with a fine plate does the work faster than a sieve and a spoon.
- Judge by set, not by the clockFifteen minutes of brisk boiling suits a vast pan of pulp. A small batch reaches setting point far sooner, and raspberries are only moderately pectic. Cook to 220F on a thermometer, or until a spoonful wrinkles on a chilled saucer.
- The vanilla stickA whole bean, infused in the sugar syrup and then lifted out, wiped and buried back in the sugar canister to be used again. Split it lengthwise for more flavour, and expect the vanilla to read as a background warmth rather than a distinct note.
- Stone jars and brandy paperThe rounds of waxed paper dipped in brandy are a surface mould guard, not a seal, and they depend on a cold larder. This is a high-sugar, high-acid preserve, so the risk is spoilage rather than anything worse, but for keeping it at room temperature use sterilised jars and a boiling-water process to a current tested schedule. Otherwise refrigerate and use within a few weeks.
- How to use it"Use as directed" points back to the rest of the book, where a preserve like this would serve for glazing, filling cakes and tarts or thinning into a sauce as well as at breakfast.
The word marmalade here carries its older, broader sense, matching French kitchen usage, where marmelade means any fruit cooked down to a smooth pulp with sugar; the English word in fact reached us from Portuguese marmelada, quince paste, and the narrowing of the term to bitter orange is largely a British habit. The quantities give the book away: twenty-five pounds of berries at a time is restaurant work, and Alexander Filippini wrote from years at Delmonico's in New York, where preserves were made in season and drawn on later by the pastry department. The reused vanilla bean, wiped and returned to the sugar jar, is a professional economy of the period, when vanilla was expensive enough that a single pod was expected to flavour more than one batch and then perfume the sugar besides. The brandy-dipped paper laid over the surface is an old European preserving habit, found in English cookery books well back into the eighteenth century, relying on alcohol to discourage the moulds that settle on an exposed jam.