Gorgeous and Glorious Marmalade

Now then, where was I?  Oh, yes, that's right, marmalade -- gorgeous and glorious marmalade.

It would seem that part of my morning ritual has become, as I sit clicking away at the major news sites on-line and waiting for the little-one to wake up, The Telegraph newspaper.  They do afterall have quite a bit of world news, and (my most favorite) a lovely 'Property' section, showing, from time to time, gorgeous photos of brick farmhouse manors (of which I will never know the like) throughout the Cotwalds and other such places.  And their food section is supposed to be quite fantastic.  (Doesn't Yotam Ottolenghi do a column for them?  Or maybe it is Nigella.  I might have my wires crossed).

And so, last week as I sat one morning sipping my enormous cup of tea, I saw an article about marmalade.  It was all about the tradition of marmalade in England -- or, more appropriately, what they dubbed as a dying tradition.  It would seem that the younger generations have zero taste and prefer chocolate spreads (such as Nutella and the like) on their toast in the morning, instead of the gorgeous and glorious marmalade of the erstwhile past.  Apparently it is only old grannies (and grandpas) who eat the golden-hued sticky stuff*.

Naturally, after this article came out, all the grannies in the country wrote angry missives to the paper demanding to be counted -- lest they forget those who laboriously make their own, refusing to buy the loathsome (apparently) stuff at the grocery store.  And they were really put-out by the whole thing.  One grannie, in particular, has been using the same recipe that she got from The Telegraph in the 1950s, year in year out ever since. 

Quite impressive, wouldn't you say?

So, after reading the article I got on the horn and started making calls to stores in the area.  No one in the whole of the United States, it would seem, carries Seville oranges.  (Meanwhile I distinctly remember all the orange trees while wandering around in Sevilla a few years ago.  Little did I know that I should have been loading up my suitcase with them.)  I sent my sister a text asking where I could buy them, and the wise-ass, I mean, lovely lady, wrote back 'Seville?'  I even called the British Pantry and they all but laughed at me.  That's why when Michael came home from work that night, I said, as casually as I could muster, 'Hey, how would you feel about going to the market tomorrow to get me some Seville oranges?  The weather is supposed to be nice.  (Oh please, oh please, oh pretty please!)'  The Market being Pike's Farmers Market in Seattle, which carries just about everything one can imagine.

And, Dear Reader, my loveliest of the lovelies husband went and got me 3 pounds of Seville oranges, which they had just gotten in that day.  (I really ought to read recipes better sometimes.  It clearly says 3 kilograms and I saw pounds.  This would have been all fine and dandy if I happened to also be a mathematician, which I am not.  So the loveliest of the lovelies husband also had to get out a calculator and do a few conversions for me.  Also, the loveliest of the lovelies rigged up a fancy contraption so that my marmalade mixture could be suspended throughout the night over a very large pot.  (Don't look at me, that is what the directions said to do.)

But there it is, gorgeous and glorious coarse-cut marmalade.  Emilia was so excited to help with it, but once she saw what I was doing with the oranges, has refused to have anything to do with it.  She thinks it looks quite suspicious and is, therefore, not to be trusted.  Although, she did not neglect grabbing her Paddington books to show us a picture of him with a big ol' pot of the stuff, store-bought, I'm sure.  (Insert your own noises here and try to look quite smug while doing so.)

And just to be exceedingly annoying, we've been eating it every morning with a nice fat loaf of home-made Musician's Bread, because that's the way I roll.  Well, except for Emilia.  She much prefers the strawberry stuff we made last summer.  Or better yet, the raspberry stuff that Grandma and Grandpa sent for Christmas.  (Seriously, when is this girl going to learn who butters her bread?  Oh, right, she already has.)

This is the recipe from The Telegraph for the perfect marmalade.  It is quite easy to make and I love the fact that it calls for no pectin.  Apparently the seeds act as a natural pectin in the boiling process.  Fascinating, no?

Diana's recipe for Seville Orange Marmalade
3kg Seville oranges
3 lemons
4.5 pints of water
3kg of sugar
Makes approximately 14 pots.
Day one
Scrub and rinse all the fruit. Diana makes her marmalade in three batches. So, for one batch, take 1kg Seville oranges and one lemon, and put them in a pressure cooker with 1.5pints of water and cook at 10lbs of pressure for 15 minutes. If you don’t have a pressure cooker, then boil in a saucepan for 'over an hour, until the fruit is cooked through,’ says Diana. Fish the fruit out of the saucepan with a slotted spoon. When it’s cool enough to handle, cut them in half. Scrape out the flesh, pith and pips and put it all in a saucepan with the original boiling water. Set the peel to one side. Boil the panful of fruit matter for five minutes and then pour into a muslin bag suspended over a jam kettle or other large pan. Add some of the sugar to the liquid in the jam kettle and stir to dissolve. Repeat twice more until all the fruit has been prepared. Cut the peel into fine shreds and add to the jam kettle. Leave to strain overnight.
Day two
Add the remainder of the sugar to the jam kettle. Put over a low heat and stir until dissolved. Bring to the boil until setting point is reached. If you are using a jam thermometer, you need to boil for about half an hour after the correct temperature is reached. Either way, the marmalade is ready when it passes the wrinkle test: drop a small amount of marmalade in a saucer and pop it in the fridge for five minutes. If the surface wrinkles when you push it with your finger, it’s ready. Pour into hot dry jars and cover at once with discs of greaseproof paper soaked in wine vinegar and screw the top on the jar immediately.

And here is the article from whence it came: Mastering the Art of Marmalade by Diana Henry.   

*Have you heard about the problem of serious obesity going on all over the place.  Maybe gobs of 'chocolate spread' on your Wonder bread is not the solution.  And maybe the old scrawny marmalade-eating grannies should not be bawked at.  I mean, really, I like chocolate just as much as the next person (if not more), but if you're going to eat chocolate --then bloody well eat some chocolate.  And not some blasphemous spread on your toast in the morning, already!  However, if it happens to be placed on a crêpe with banana slices, then I deny ever having said any of this.  Because those are divine and everyone knows it.