Hot sticky marmalade-making action

Going on a marmalade-making adventure is not an activity suited for a weekday evening. It’s a laborious effort, requiring work on two consecutive days, and involves leaving the stove on for hours on end. But it’s great fun. And sometimes, making a food from scratch is the only way to get inside of it, to understand what gives it its character, and how its ingredients transform and combine into something new and unique.

Marmalade could easily be dismissed. It isn’t very popular anymore, and has been declining in use even in its British homeland. It’s bitter, strongly flavored, and arguably, an acquired taste. But when it’s done right, done rustically, and done by hand, even humble little marmalade can teach us something about how industrialized food has lowered our standards, blurred our collective food memories, and turned our palettes toward bland substitutes.

In the 19^th and 20^th centuries, staple foods that had previously been made at home were slowly replaced by more “hygienic” and “pure” versions made in factories with accounting departments. Homemade bread was demonized as provincial and dirty, and replaced with blisteringly white uniform loaves of air. And gradually, everything from beer to marshmallows to lettuce got marched upon by the inexorable progress, and the production processes for all of our food got streamlined, rendering a homogenous, reliably mediocre simulacrum of the original.

Now, over a century later, most of us have grown up never having tasted the originals that were supplanted by factory food. And now, with a few generations insulating us from our culinary heritage, even the foods that tug our nostalgic heartstrings probably came in a brightly-colored box with a catchy brand name.

What we call marmalade today has been around since the 17^th century, although the roots of the word go back to 16^th century Portuguese. The myth of how marmalade became associated with Britain and oranges and Paddington Bear goes like this - a Spanish merchant ship offloaded a cargo of Sevilles while delayed unexpectedly in Dundee, and the crafty Scot bargain hunter who picked them up devised a way to make these otherwise inedible fruits into something of value. The rest is history, and marmalade eventually joined red phone boxes and bulldogs as quintessential British icons.

Today, any supermarket will reveal a few pallid renditions of this classic, and thankfully, in the last few years, there’ve been a few imported or organic varieties that resemble the real thing, albeit with hefty price tags. But as with many foods, the most common offerings are like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, and the high-resolution original is nowhere to be seen. High-fructose corn syrup in a carrot-orange gel suspending some microscopic flecks of orange peel do not a marmalade make. Ahem, I'm talking to you, Mr. Smucker. Seriously, what the hell is this, and where do you get off calling it "All Natural"? Bastards.

So let’s make it ourselves, shall we? It’s January, and the requisite Seville oranges are in their fleetingly brief season. A pedantic note for eager marmaladiers, by the way - Sevilles are absolutely required. They’re difficult to come by, and even in California, people have been known to resort to pilfering from decorative Seville trees on private property to get their mitts on them, but they’re the only way to go. Navel oranges are bumper cars to these bittersweet Ferraris, so don’t even bother.

It’s a lot like making jam, but the fruit part of the fruit is used only to extract pectin and juice. The juice, sugar and lovely bitter orange peel are combined, and succumb to several hours of deliciously inefficient time simmering and bubbling and darkening. Finally, here emerges a sticky, fragrant and incredibly flavorful and caramelized mélange, more complex than anything on offer in the store. It’s a time machine to the days when food was food, and it’s well worth the effort. Take a look.

The Recipe

Ingredients:

1.5 kg Seville oranges (make sure they’re Sevilles!)

A Meyer lemon for flavor (optional)

2.5 kg sugar (I like unrefined organic, but bright white will do)

3 liters of water

One grain bag, from a homebrew supply story (Gauze or muslin made into a bag will do in a pinch)

Makes about 9 half-pint jars

Put your oranges and lemons into a stock pot and add 3 liters of water. Bring up the heat and simmer, tightly covered, for about 3 hours. Kill the heat and let it cool.

Remove the fruit, which will now be soft and pliable, and save half a liter of the cooking liquid for later. Cut the oranges and lemons in half and scoop out all of the insides back into the pot. Pith, seeds, fruit, juice, everything! Save the orange peels for later and discard the lemon peel. Pour in the half liter of cooking liquid and simmer the mixture for 15 minutes.

Place the grain bag into a large bowl, and wrap the end around the lip of the bowl, so that the bag acts as a filter for anything being poured in. If you’re using muslin, just be careful to hold the cloth completely over the bowl.

Pour the mixture of citrus gunk and cooking liquid into the bowl, using the grain bag as a filter to hold the solid bits. Let it cool, and when it’s cool enough to touch, squeeze the bajeebus out of the bag to get all of the pectin and juice into the bowl. This gross gooey mess is critical to getting your marm to set, so don’t be shy with it, even if it does look like a bag of snot.

Now go do something else. Seriously, you’ve been in the kitchen forever. You have friends, right? Go wash the orange snot off your hands and go out for some drinks or something. Come back the next day for the next step:

Remember those orange peels from before? It’s time to chop them up. Look deep within your soul and ask, ‘How chunky do I like my marmalade?’. These chunks won’t get much smaller when they cook, so bear that in mind as you chop. Make little ribbons or big postage-stamp sized hunks; I won’t judge you.

Take the bowl of juicy squeezins and plop everything into your stock pot again. Add your precious peel bits to the pot. Now it’s time for sugar. Weigh out your 2.5 kg of sweet stuff and add it to your pot. No, I won’t give you a conversion for cups or ounces. Volume is inaccurate and I like metric, so stop whining.

This is going to look ridiculous, by the way. Your carefully-produced orange concoction is going to be drowned in a deluge of sugar, and you’ll think you screwed up the measuring. But you didn’t; the truth is that marmalade just has a lot of sugar in it. Diabetics beware. Incidentally, some crafty souls, like June Taylor here in the San Francisco Bay Area, have been able to pull off preserves with much less sugar, but I’m sticking to a traditional recipe here. By all means, experiment!

Get out your trusty wooden marmalade-stirring spoon and stir it up over low heat. Keep it moving until it no longer looks like a big pile of sand, but rather a bright orange goopy blob. Got your orange goopy blob? Good. Put the lid on and keep the heat low. This is going to take awhile.

Four freaking hours later, you’ll have something mighty fine. If you’re the time management wizard I am, it will be the middle of the night by this point, but that’s alright. Your pot will be full of something much darker and menacing-looking, and will be so fragrant that your neighbors will think you’ve built a lab for orange-flavored meth.

You’ll need to test your handiwork for correct stickiness – put a dish in the freezer for a few minutes, then dollop a bit of marmalade onto the dish. Poke at it. Has it formed a skin? Well then you’re in the marmalade business, my friend. If not, then just keep the stove bubbling until you can pass the marmy skin test.

Whew! Now turn off the stove and set up your canning equipment, and fill up those jars in just the same way you’d do a normal jam. Be sanitary and follow the instructions for your jars, of course. Now presto – you’ve got more jars of genuine actual bullshit-free marmalade than you could ever dream of eating. Enjoy.