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Scotch Orange Marmalade
Weigh the oranges and set aside an equal weight of sugar. Put the fruit, whole, into cold water to cover, bring to a boil, pour off the water and add as much more, and simmer until the fruit can be easily pierced with a fork. Cut the fruit in thin slices, throw away all of the seeds, return to the water, add the sugar and cook until it jellies, about an hour or less. Put into jars for use. They can be cooked with the same amount of sugar, cutting the skin first into strips, discarding the pith and membrane and seeds, and adding the pulp to the water and sugar.
ROSE JELLY, to serve with Pork or Game. (England.) Collect the red seed pods of the rose when the frost has turned them, wash them, slit open, and take out the seeds. Add to every pint of pips 1/4 pint of white wine vinegar and 3/4 pound of sugar. Boil and stir rapidly, rub through a sieve, and cook for 1/2 hour longer. Cool and pack into tumblers, for use. Will keep in a cool place.
Two preserves in one entry: a whole-fruit Scotch marmalade and an English rose-hip jelly for the meat platter. Both are workable, but the original assumes bitter Seville oranges, a jelly bag, and a cool larder.
- Use Seville oranges"Scotch" marmalade normally means the bitter Seville, in season roughly January to February; its high pectin and acid are what make equal weights of fruit and sugar set. Sweet navels or Valencias are lower in both and tend to give a soft, cloying syrup. If only sweet oranges are available, add the juice of a lemon per pound of fruit.
- Why the water is poured offThe first boil-and-drain removes some of the harsh bitterness from the peel. Do not skip it, and do not drain more than once or the marmalade loses the edge that distinguishes it from orange jam.
- Keep the cooking waterThe pectin leaches out of the peel and pith into the simmering water, so the fruit is returned to it rather than to fresh water. The seeds are also rich in pectin; tying them in a scrap of muslin and simmering them with the fruit, then discarding, gives a firmer set than throwing them away at once.
- Testing the set"Cook until it jellies" means 220F/105C on a sugar thermometer at sea level, or a spoonful chilled on a cold saucer that wrinkles when pushed. An hour is optimistic for a full batch in a wide pan; check from 30 minutes and stir often once it thickens, as sugar at that concentration scorches quickly.
- YieldRoughly 2 lb of oranges plus 2 lb of sugar gives about five half-pint jars.
- "Put into jars for use"Period practice was hot jars, hot preserve, and a cool larder, often finished with a paper and brandy seal or a layer of melted wax. Modern practice is a 10-minute boiling-water bath for sealed jars, or simply keeping the filled jars in the refrigerator and using them within a couple of months.
- Rose hips need dehairingThe "red seed pods" are rose hips, best after the first frost when they soften and sweeten. Inside, packed around the seeds, are fine stiff hairs that are a serious irritant to the mouth and gut; slitting, seeding and then sieving as directed is what removes them, and the sieving step is not optional.
- Tumblers and quantitiesA pint of hips is a volume measure of prepared, seeded hips, not a weight. "Tumblers" are drinking glasses, a common Victorian jelly vessel; use jars. The finished jelly is a sharp sweet-sour condiment in the manner of redcurrant or rowan jelly, not a spread.
Marmalade of this whole-fruit kind is bound up with Dundee, where the trade in bitter Seville oranges from Spain met a Scottish taste for boiled sugar preserves in the late eighteenth century; the founding story of the Keiller family and a storm-driven cargo of oranges is traditional rather than documented, but the commercial Dundee marmalade industry itself is real and by 1900 had made chunky bitter-orange marmalade a fixture of the British breakfast table. The word itself is older and originally meant a quince paste, from the Portuguese marmelo, quince. The rose-hip jelly beside it belongs to a different tradition entirely, the English sweet-sharp jellies served with pork and game alongside redcurrant, crab apple and rowan, all of them made from hedgerow fruit gathered after frost. That the two sit together at all is worth noting; the entry itself carries a country tag, '(England.)'