My plan is to make
a virtue of this problem and try out a number of different recipes until I find
one that I can call my own.
Having already
made one batch of my mother’s recipe, I thought I’d do a definitive, classic
Seville orange recipe to establish a control group before venturing down any
other paths. So I went looking for such a recipe – and discovered that there is
no such thing.
Julian Barnes
already knew this. In his book Pulse, while explaining the Marmalade Theory of
Britishness*, one character observes of marmalade that ‘everyone does it differently
and everyone thinks theirs is the right way’.
Having looked in
vain for that one definitive recipe, I can now confirm that this is absolutely
true. In fact, what I find is that most people faithfully follow their mother’s
recipe and have no idea that there is another way.
For example, until
I attended a marmalade-making demo recently at Fortnum’s, I had no idea that
you didn’t need to use a muslin bag to put all your pips and pulp in. The cooks
just chopped up all the fruit and peel, fished out the pips, and shoved
everything back in the pan. Excellent marmalade and not a whiff of muslin
anywhere. This was a revelation.
And after spending
a day in Cumbria at the World Marmalade Awards this weekend, listening to
people talk about how they make their marmalade, it’s clear that everyone has a
slightly/completely different method to mine. It’s amazing that we all end up
with the same thing.
Perplexed, I have
just done a brief survey of a handful of my cookbooks. Between Agnes Jekyll,
Constance Spry, Nigella Lawson, Prue Leith, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and
Delia Smith, all of whom can be trusted to do things properly, the methods vary
enormously. Lids on or off, muslin or no muslin, pith in or out, warm sugar or
cold, boil oranges first or peel them first… There seem to be no rules
whatsoever.
This is going to
be more interesting than I thought.
*The Marmalade
Theory of Britishness
In Julian Barnes’s
Pulse, Phil is trying to refute his friend’s theory that, thanks to the Euro
and the EU etc., we’re all the same now – British, French, whatever. Phil
disagrees and presents as his evidence a survey, which found that everyone
makes marmalade slightly differently. Which for him means that while we think
we’re all the same, underneath we’re in fact very different.
As a theory of
Britishness, it’s a bit tenuous; but as an observation upon the making of
marmalade, it’s spot on.
PS – A Definition
of Marmalade
At the Fortnum’s
demo, Jane Hasell-McCosh* gave out tasters of her marmalades, including a Kitchen
Garden Marmalade, in which one of the ingredients is rhubarb. One of the
audience asked if this was strictly marmalalade, as surely it had to be citrus.
According to Jane, it depends what your local trading standards officer says.
In Cumbria, it counts as marmalade, because it is primarily citrus; in another
county it might not. And we won’t even get into what the EU thinks. I’m
strangely delighted that Britain doesn’t appear to have a legal definition for
one of its favourite foods. I will have to look into this.
*Founder of the
World Marmalade Awards – I know I’ve mentioned them a lot recently, but they
are the equivalent of the Marmalade Olympics, so they do tend to crop up a lot.
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