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Orange Marmalade
One dozen oranges and four lemons; pare and slice and break in small pieces. Put skins and pits in one bowl and pulps in another. Put three pints of cold water over each and let it stand over night. Boil each separately twenty minutes; strain the liquid from the skins and add it to the pulp; when the skins are cold, slice very fine and put all together. Add ten pounds of granulated sugar and boil until it jellies. Put in jelly glasses and cover when cold.
A two-stage marmalade: the peel and pips are extracted separately from the pulp, then everything is recombined with sugar. The instructions are terse but complete, and the proportions are workable if you understand what the 1900 cook took for granted.
- The hinge: the pipsThe seeds and white pith are the main pectin source, which is why they get their own three pints of water and their own boiling. The recipe is explicit that the strained liquid from the skins goes into the pulp; keep it, and give the overnight soak its time, or the set will be weaker.
- "Pare and slice"Pare means removing the peel, not peeling away flesh. The peel goes into the pot in fairly large pieces, is boiled twenty minutes to soften, cooled, then sliced very fine as the recipe directs; the fine shredding comes after the boiling, not before.
- Sugar quantityTen pounds is about 22 cups. It is a high-set, old-style ratio, close to the combined weight of fruit and water. Cutting it substantially will change the set and shorten the keeping life.
- Volume of panSix pints of liquid plus ten pounds of sugar needs a preserving pan of at least 10-12 quarts. Marmalade at a rolling boil climbs, and this quantity will boil over a stockpot.
- "Boil until it jellies"Expect 30-50 minutes of hard boiling after the sugar dissolves. The setting point is 220F on a candy thermometer, or the wrinkle test on a chilled saucer.
- "Cover when cold"In a period jelly glass this most likely meant a poured paraffin seal over the surface, though paper or tin covers were also used. Paraffin sealing is no longer recommended; use standard canning jars, and either process them in a boiling water bath or keep the finished jars refrigerated.
- YieldThis makes a very large quantity, well over a dozen half-pint jars. Halving the recipe works, though the boil to setting point will be shorter.
- Fruit choiceOranges of this period were generally seedy. Modern navels are nearly seedless, which robs you of pectin; use Valencias, or add a Seville or two if you can find them in winter.
Marmalade in English cookery began as a stiff quince paste — the word comes from the Portuguese marmelo, quince — and only migrated to citrus over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the loose, shred-suspended orange preserve is often traced to Scotland, though that origin is traditional rather than documented. Marmalade was still primarily a feat of putting-up, made in one heroic batch when the winter citrus arrived from Florida or the Mediterranean, and boiled with enough sugar to sit on a shelf for a year. The two-bowl, overnight-soak method here is the classic domestic workaround for extracting pectin before commercial pectin was available; once Certo and similar products reached American grocers, recipes like this one steadily lost their pips-and-peel arithmetic.