Making Marmalade II: Jane & Delia
‘I got the blues
thinking of the future, so I left off and made some marmalade. It’s amazing how
it cheers one up to shred oranges and scrub the floor.’
D H Lawrence
As this is
National Marmalade Week, this is clearly a good time to crack the perfect
marmalade recipe.
Since Batch One,
I’ve had two more attempts: Jane Grigson’s recipe from English Food and a Delia
Smith recipe with variations.
Jane Grigson’s
recipe uses 3lbs oranges, 6lbs sugar (lord help us) and 6 pints of water, which
looks rather a lot of water at first. But this batch is twice
the size of my first one, so – courage. I boil the oranges for the required 1
1/2 hours then break off till the evening to finish it off. The cooked oranges
sit in a bowl, quietly collapsing. Several recipes tell you to cut up the
oranges first, but I can’t imagine why – the cooked oranges are as soft as
butter and much easier to cut.
The finished
marmalade is pretty good; lighter than Batch One and not as strong and a really
beautiful, deep golden colour. But still quite intense and syrupy, so clearly I
haven’t sorted the over-boiling thing.
Delia Smith’s recipe suggested cooking the mixture slowly for 2 1/2 hrs to get a dark, thick
vintage-style marmalade. Which sounds tremendous, but I need a lighter style for
proper comparison, so I cooked it for the usual 20 minutes, which was fine. I
also took out two Sevilles and replaced them with sweet oranges, just to see
what would happen.
Delia has an
interesting method of removing all the pips and pith, putting them in a
saucepan with some of the boiling liquid, cooking them for 10 minutes,
straining it all through some muslin back into the cooking liquid, then
discarding the muslin bag and letting the whole thing sit overnight.
This tasted
tremendous when warm, with a distinct aftertaste of sweet oranges. That sadly
faded when it cooled, but it’s still quite a good marmalade. But it’s not that
different from Batches One and Two – and still syrupy (all of which, I add hastily, is clearly the fault of the cook, not the recipe).
I am aware that this
is starting to sound a bit geeky, and will reassure you that my aim is to
simplify the recipe, not complicate it with 79 fiddlesome technicalities and
variations. I will find the perfect recipe sooner or later, so if that’s what
you’re hoping for, just skip these bits and wait for a post entitled The
Perfect Marmalade Recipe; it will come, I promise. Eventually.
I had to pot
Delia-with-Variations in a hurry while it was still very hot, which meant that
all the peel floated to the tops of the jars; so I turned them upside-down and
instructed G to invert them in about half an hour, hoping it would even out.
This worked, though he did admit that quite a bit of shaking was involved. But
the peel was evenly distributed, just as it should be. Crisis averted.
I know that you are supposed to pot it hot, to sterilise the lids and ensure that it doesn’t go mouldy, so I was a bit puzzled; but have since read that if your marmalade is the right consistency, the peel doesn’t float. So more
work needed there. And I really need to get a jam funnel. Trying to pour hot, sticky marmalade into small-necked jars in a tearing hurry
while dressed in smart work clothes is not to be recommended.
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