This is my mother-in-law’s recipe for Marmalade. It’s a strong, earthy, chunky marmalade which will make you grow up healthy, and slightly brown. Seville Oranges have a very short season, approximately in January. Marmalade keeps for several years, which is handy, as it’s too much work to make this marmalade every year.
Ingredients
4lb Seville Oranges
2 Lemons
2 Sweet Oranges
6 pints Water
6 lbs Granulated White Sugar
Method
Wash fruit well and place into a preserving pan with the water. Bring to the boil and simmer moderately fast until soft enough to pierce with a fork (approximately 1 hour). Take the fruit out, leaving the juices in the pan.
When cool, cut the fruit into chunky bits, discarding pips and retaining the juice which runs out of the fruit. Expect this cutting process to take a long time and hurt your fingers; how you cut the fruit determines how good the marmalade will be.
You can cheat and use a liquidiser very briefly, but neither your marmalade nor your soul will benefit. Return the shredded fruit and any juice to the pan and stir in the sugar. Bring to the boil and boil moderately fast until set, stirring frequently to avoid it sticking and burning.
Pot while hot, and cover when quite cold.
The fun part of making marmalade is testing it to see if it’s set yet. This is done by dribbling a bit of the cooking marmalade onto a plate which has been chilled in the fridge. After leaving for a minute or so, draw your finger through the marmalade. If you can see that a skin has formed, then the marmalade is set. Mostly of course, it’s not, so you have to lick the plate, wash it, dry it and return it to the fridge.
Love marmalade, but we only do mandarines and/or cumquats for the extra strong sourness! I wish I’d had it as a child and grown up brown instead of speckled!!