slothful cook

The point of this recipe is that the marmalade is very much less sweet than anything you can buy commercially. The recipe was originally my grandfather’s. My mother has used it for many years, steadily increasing the proportion of fruit to sugar. My sister and I have rewritten it and made a few amendments for convenience’s sake. Be warned – it takes something like 5 hours beginning to end. It makes about 8-9 lb of marmalade.

1.5kg Seville oranges

3 lemons and 2 grapefruit (or some other mixture of citrus fruit to the same weight)

2kg sugar

5 pints water, or replace part of the water with whisky to make the same volume

1. Put the sugar somewhere warm (near the hob but out of the way will do, it just needs not to be cold).

2. Wash fruit. Pierce each once or twice in order to let the juice out whilst cooking (but not so much as to let the pips out). This reduces the amount of boiling citrus juice squirted around your kitchen in step 4. Put into a very large pan with the water, bring to the boil and simmer very gently with the lid on until the fruit is tender, about 30 minutes. (The water will probably not cover all the fruit – this doesn’t matter, but push the grapefruit down to the bottom as it takes the longest).

3. Whilst the fruit cooks, you could sterilise the jars. Or you could do it during step 7. In any event, you need them ready at the end of step 7.

4. Remove pan from the heat. Remove fruit from water with tongs, squeezing each fruit gently (or it will spit in your eye) to leave the juice, but not the pips, with the water in the pan. For each fruit, cut into half. Remove pips and any tough-looking bits of pith with a teaspoon and retain in a separate bowl. Slice the remaining peel and pulp to the desired thickness and return to the pan of water/juice.

5. Put the retained pips/pith onto a piece of muslin. Tie up tightly with string to form a closed bag (as for bouquet garni), leaving a longish tail of string. Put the bag into the pan with the water and fruit and tie the other end of the string to the handle of the pan.

6. Bring the water/fruit mixture back to the boil. When it’s boiling, remove from the heat, let it come off the boil, and add the sugar, stirring vigorously (but mind the string!) to dissolve. Check carefully that it’s all dissolved – if it hasn’t, you will be able to feel the gritty bits under your spoon and see grains on the back of the spoon. The original recipe suggested warming the sugar gently in a low oven first, but I haven’t found this to be necessary as my kitchen is usually fairly warm by the time the sugar is needed – if you do do it, be very careful not to burn it.

7. Once the sugar is thoroughly dissolved, return the pan to the heat, and cook at a fast rolling boil (not a gentle simmer), uncovered, until you achieve a set. Experience suggests that this will take around 90 minutes, but start testing it from about 45 minutes. Press the bag of pips against the side of the pan with the spoon from time to time to extract as much pectin as possible, at the same time giving a stir in case it’s sticking at the bottom.

8. Once you achieve a set, remove the pan from the heat. Transfer the marmalade into your sterilised jars. Do this more or less immediately as it will quite likely start to set in the pan by end, but also do it gradually by putting a little into each jar to begin with to warm the jars up. If you put boiling marmalade into a cold jar, it may well explode. If you have sterilised them with boiling water and then left them in a warm kitchen they should be OK. A very small ladle is useful for this, but you will inevitably dribble it down the jars anyway. Put the lids on and wipe the jars whilst they are still hot.

A very large pan. The largest size of oval Le Creuset casserole (11 pt capacity) is probably just big enough. I use a vast stainless-steel stock-pot. Wide and shallow is better than tall and thin. Bigger is better than smaller since the marmalade tends to splash when boiling. It needs a lid.

Sterilise the jars. These could be any sort of jam-jars or as it might be pasta sauce jars saved for the purpose, or you can buy them at www.lakelandlimited.co.uk. Last time I used 12 ? lb jars. My mother just washes them thoroughly with very hot water and washing-up liquid. Shirley also keeps them in a warm oven until needed. My sister puts them through the dish-washer. I actually go so far as to fill each one right to the top with boiling water from the kettle and likewise the lids in a shallow Pyrex dish (slowly and carefully to allow the jar to warm up, and leaving the water there until the jar is cool enough to pick up with oven gloves to empty). You can apparently also shake cold water around each jar and microwave it on high for a minute, but I have not tried this. Because this marmalade is low-sugar, it keeps less well than shop-bought. I quote my mother:-“I occasionally have a jar go mouldy, but I just scrape the mould off the top and eat the rest”. I doubt that this approach would be considered best practice by the food safety authorities but chacune a son goût.

Piece of muslin. These can also be purchased from www.lakelandlimited.co.uk. If you don’t want to wait, you can instead boil the pips in a separate small pan with a little water for about 20-30 minutes and then strain the liquid from the pan into the large pan with the fruit, pressing the remains down with a wooden spoon to extract every last bit of pectin. If you do this, the final boil (step 7) may well take a little less time to set since you will be starting it with the pectin already extracted from the pips, but you will be left with more washing-up and an anxiety about whether you in fact extracted enough pectin for a set at all.

Achieve a set. Keep a small saucer in the fridge. Put a little of the boiling mixture on the saucer and return to the fridge to cool for a few minutes. Push it gently with your finger or the point of a knife. If it has set, the surface will wrinkle up. If not, repeat at decreasing intervals as your thoughts turn towards supper. The web has assorted useful advice for rescuing marmalade or jam which won’t set, but I have not yet needed to experiment with any of these. My mother has more than once run out of time or energy and put the marmalade in the jars before being certain about the set. Sometimes it’s been set next morning. Sometimes we have been eating very sloppy marmalade for months.