Marmalade

Marmalade from Seville Oranges - John Gosden
             Marmalade on Biscuits - Mary S.
The Recipes
             Lemon-Lime Marmalade
             Lemon Marmalade
             Recipe for Marmalade Made With Seville Oranges
             Grapefruit Marmalade Recipe
             Vic's Seville Orange Marmalade Recipe             

Marmalade from Seville Oranges - John Gosden
I always made marmalade from Seville oranges when I lived in Edinburgh. They appeared just once a year, in January, and their arrival was greeted with boilings and simmerings and delicious smells. Here we have an extraordinary variety of citrus, many of which I had never met before. There are dozens of kinds which, I suspect, would all be lumped as "tangerines" - loose skinned, sweet, few seeds, but the range of flavours is great. Then there are the sour ones - limes of several varieties (we grow a couple of seedless ones), a marble sized fruit called Som jeet (all citrus are 'som', except limes and lemons, which are 'manau') which are very good in our 3-fruit marmalade (pineapple, pomelo and lime), one which claims to be the same as Seville orange (som jaa) but has smaller fruit than the ones from Spain, which we don't see here, pomelos, of course, and ugli fruit, as well as that staple of Thai cooking, Kafir lime (which we also grow). Many of these are at their best in northern Thailand, with a more seasonal climate than here in the south, but we grow a few for our own use, and the rest are cheap enough to buy and consume in quantity, which has to be good for us!

Marmalade on Biscuits - Mary S.
Yummy: take a home-made biscuit (the American definition), split, spread bottom half with butter, then with orange marmalade, add an inch-square piece of crisp bacon, place top half back on top, and ENJOY.

The Recipes
Lemon-Lime Marmalade
Ingredients
2 pounds limes
2 pounds lemons
6 cups sugar, approximately
8 cups water, approximately
Directions
Choose fruit that has not been waxed. Place fruit in a large kettle and add water just to cover. Bring to a boil and simmer until fruit can be pierced with a fork. Remove fruit, reserving water in which it was boiled. Cool fruit, cut lengthwise into quarters, remove seeds, and slice as thinly as possible. Return fruit, along with any accumulated juices, to water and measure into large kettle. For every one cup of liquid, add 3/4 cup sugar. Bring to a boil and boil quickly until mixture reaches jelly stage (220 degrees F on candy thermometer). Pour into sterilized 1/2 pint or 1 pint jars, seal and process according to jar manufacturer's instructions.

Lemon Marmalade
Ingredients
3 lbs. lemons
15 cups water
6 lbs. (12 cups) white sugar
Directions
Wash all the lemons thoroughly in warm water, remove the stalks. Cut them in half and squeeze out the juice. Remove the pips, cut away excess pith if it is very thick and tie the excess pith and pips (seeds) into a muslin bag. Slice the skins into matchstick strips and place these in the cooking pan with the juice, pit and pips and the water. Bring to the boil and simmer until the strips of skin are very tender. Remove the muslin bag and squeeze out any liquid. Add the sugar, bring to the boil again, stirring until the sugar is dissolved. Boil rapidly until the setting point is reached. Skim. Allow the marmalade to cool slightly before pouring it into hot clean jars. Cover.
Lemon Ginger Marmalade: Make as above . Add 4 oz. chopped crystallized ginger at the same time as the sugar.
Spiced Lemon Marmalade: Make as above. Place either 8 whole cloves or 1 stick cinnamon in the muslin bag with the pith and pits.

Recipe for Marmalade Made With Seville Oranges
Introduction
Orange marmalade is made with a special kind of orange, traditionally known here in Britain as "Seville Oranges": they appear on the market in late January each year and are available only for a couple of weeks. They are very different from dessert orange varieties (you would not consider eating them raw!). In any case, I would not make marmalade from any ordinary dessert citrus fruit (oranges, lemons, grapefruit, limes, whatever) in Great Britain, as the skins will have been treated with unspeakable chemicals to prevent them from going mouldy.
The recipe given here (in Imperial measurements) was adapted from one I got from my mother, and my original script is dated 20 Jan 1968.
Ingredients
Seville oranges, Sugar, Water.
For every 2 lb of oranges, use 5 lb of sugar and 5 (Imperial) pints of water. (USA readers may need to know that 5 Imperial pints are pretty close to 6 US pints).
Metric equivalents would be 1 kg oranges, 2.5 kg sugar, and 3 litre water.
Equipment
A simple squeezer is handy (thing with a fluted dome onto which you press the halves of fruit, and some kind of rack or gate in it that traps the pips/seeds). A container is needed for soaking: I use a small food-grade polythene bucket. Do not use clear plastics (some of them get attacked by the fruit) nor metal bowls for this; glazed earthenware is also not advised. For dealing with the peels, I shred a proportion with a sharp knife, and mince the rest in a "Spong" mincer; there are special peel slicers available that would do a neat job, but I don't find them necessary, and they clutter up the store cupboard for the rest of the year. A boilable bag (mine is nylon, from a home brew suppliers).
For the actual boiling, a metal pan is fine: I use an aluminium "jam kettle" (English term) = "jelly pan" (Scots). The best weapon for stirring is a large wooden spoon.
A little theory
I added this part when I realised from emails that some readers could not quite understand what was going on here, or were confused by my terminology. Let's take a look at the construction of an orange. The outer coat is what we call the "peel", it consists of a thick white skin with a thin outer orange-coloured layer: we are going to use all of this in the recipe. Inside of that outer peel, the fruit is made up of individual segments, which inside are flesh and juice, and also contain seeds (which in Britain we call "pips"). The flesh and juice is wanted in the recipe, but you certainly don't want those pips in your marmalade. The segments are enclosed a kind of skin which, in order to avoid confusing it with the outer peel, I am now calling "membrane" in the text below. You can put that into the marmalade if you want (e.g by mincing it up), but many people find it makes the marmalade too bitter for their taste.
Jam sets by means of "pectin", which is contained in most kinds of fruit (a few fruits, e.g strawberries, don't have enough, but it's no problem with oranges). We're going to extract some more pectin from the pips and the membranes, which is why the recipe tells you to put those into a bag and boil them together with the fruit, up till the point where you are going to add sugar (see the recipe for details).
Method
Wash the fruit well, discarding any damaged parts. Halve the fruits, squeeze them, and put the juice into the bucket. The pips etc. that got retained in the gate of the squeezer, you put into the nylon bag. Use the bowl of a spoon to scrape the remaining membranes out of the peels, and add those to the nylon bag too, leaving just the peels to be dealt with in the next step.
Now I would shred about a third of the peels with a sharp knife, and mince the rest. Depending on how you like your marmalade, you could shred then all, or put them through a slicer, or mince them all. Put the shredded/minced peels into the bucket along with the juice; tie up the nylon bag and put that in also. Now add about half of the measured amount of cold water: (you can add more of it, if the bucket is big enough to take it). Cover the bucket and leave it in a cool place at least overnight, or even for 24 hours. This soaking is an essential part of the recipe: the results won't be nearly as good if you try to omit it.
After the soaking, put the contents of the bucket, including the nylon bag of pips, into the jam kettle, and add the remainder of the measured amount of water. Bring carefully to the boil, and simmer gently for as long as is required to get the shredded peels tender. This is likely to take an hour or more of gentle simmering: a sample of peel should feel quite tender if rubbed between thumb and finger, and if sugar is added too soon, the peel can become leathery.
When the peels are properly tender, it's time to remove the bag of pips (allowing any liquid in the bag to drain back into the jam kettle: it contains pectin that helps the jam to set well); the contents of the bag will be discarded, and the bag laundered for future use.
Add the sugar into the jam kettle and bring back to the boil, stirring to make sure the sugar does not "catch" on the pan. When the sugar is fully dissolved, bring the pan to a full rolling boil and keep it boiling (relaxing the heat only if the marmalade threatens to froth over). If a white scum forms on the surface, skim it off and discard it (this is quite normal); a little translucent foam is harmless and can be ignored. With experience one learns to recognize the developments, in terms of the appearance of the jam and the slightly sticky sound of the bubbling, but it's difficult to describe them: you just have to keep taking samples onto a cool plate and see what they do. It's difficult to predict how long this will take, but half an hour of brisk boiling would not be untypical. When the samples start to form a distinct "skin" on the test plate within a couple of minutes, the marmalade is "done" and should be taken off the heat. While still hot (this kills any mould spores that might be around), ladle it into jars. Be careful: dropping hot jam onto your feet etc. could be a serious matter, so work safely.
Nowadays, (my mother would not like me to admit) I collect screw-top jars that had contained shop-bought jams, and re-use them with their screw tops, instead of using the traditional jampot covers.
Favorite Snack
A favourite snack is a slice of one of the light English cheeses, such as Lancashire or Wensleydale, grilled on toast and with orange marmalade spread on top. Wholemeal toast, naturally. Yummy!

Grapefruit Marmalade Recipe
Take six grapefruit and four lemons; cut each fruit in quarters and slice the quarters through pulp and rind as thin as possible, discarding all seeds. Weigh the prepared fruit, and to each pound add three pints of cold water. Set aside for twenty-four hours. Let boil gently until the rind is perfectly tender, then set aside until the next day. Weight the material and to each pound add one pound of sugar. Let cook until it thickens slightly on a cold dish. The mixture will thicken still more on cooling and care must be taken not to cook it too much. Stir occasionally, while cooking, to avoid burning. Store as jelly. With a small, hard-wood board upon which to rest the fruit, and a thin, sharp knife, the slicing is quickly done. Use all the water designated.

Vic's Seville Orange Marmalade Recipe
Ingredients
5-6 Seville Oranges
1 Lemon
1 1/2 cups water (or as needed)
1/4 tsp. Baking Soda (optional as I find it sometimes causes froth)
2:1 Ratio Sugar to Cooked Down Peel and Juice Mixture
1 1/2 (47g) Boxes of fruit pectin crystals (about the size of a box of Jell-O)
6 - 10 236ml (1 cup) flat wide mouth canning jars
Method:
First make sure you have a good book on canning so you know the general procedures for making safe cooked preserves, jams and jellies. You can get one from BERNARDIN Company.
You can make marmalade all in one go, but it will take about 3 hours or more. I make it on Friday evening and Saturday morning to make it less tedious.
After supper I cut each fruit in half. I extract the juice using a hand juicer. What you want is about 3 cups of juice and pulp. Carefully remove and discard seeds and membranes but retain the pulp and juice. If you have more than three cups of juice/pulp cut down on the water used elsewhere in this recipe and substitute the extra juice for the water. Put the mixture in a plastic container and refrigerate over night.
Scrape as much of the membrane from inside the peel with a spoon. Cut peel into wedges (about 6 per 1/2 orange). Try to remove all but 1/16 to a 1/8 of an inch of the inside white with a spoon or knife.
Use a sharp knife, vegetable cleaver or scissors to cut the peel into FINE shreds about 1/16 inch wide by 3/4-inch long slivers. FINE is important! This is tedious. I do it with scissors while watching television. Just sit down with two bowls, one of the peel wedges and one of the shredded peel and go for it. What you want is about 3 cups of shredded peel. If you have more of less don't worry about it. We will fix that later. Refrigerate peel in a covered plastic bowl.
The next morning, combine baking soda, shredded peel and water in a large heavy-bottomed pot (at least 12" across by about 7" deep). Cover and boil for about 10 minutes. Add extra water if necessary so it does not boil dry.
Add juice/pulp mixture; bring to a boil; cover and cook for at least 20 minutes. What you want to do is cook the peel until it is tender. Stir it frequently and add just enough water so it does not burn and yields a thick slurry when done. Adjust extra time until the peel is tender.
Measure the volume of the mixture. You should have between 3 and 5 cups of this slurry. If you have more, perhaps you have too much water, so try to reduce it in volume a bit by cooking it longer and stirring constantly. Add two cups of white sugar for each cup of the boiled down peel/juice mixture; stir; bring to a boil and cook for 15 minutes. What you want is to stir almost constantly and keep the heat so it will boil gently but not froth or overflow.
Remove from heat, add pectin crystals. Return to heat for 5 minutes, skim and stir but reduce heat so it does not froth. Test for thickness using the cold plate method. If not thick enough, return a gentle boil until desired consistency is achieved. Discard any froth. Pour final result into hot sterilized wide-mouthed flat 1 cup (~236ml) snap cap canning jars. Seal immediately and process in a hot water bath according the instructions in your canning book. Allow to cool and set for at least 24 hours.
Hints:
If you don't know if you will like this type of marmalade, buy some Imported Scottish marmalade first.
You may have to cook the peel for up to an hour to get it tender enough. Taste it for tenderness, not "taste" as it will be very sour. The sugar will fix that.
If it doesn't set, it will still taste good.
If it is too runny, make another batch and add the old batch when you have bottled about half of the new batch. Boil the mixture down and rebottle in clean sterilized canning jars.
I suggest the flat jars to stop the peel from floating to the top.
If you think this is too much work, cut up the oranges and put them through the food processor. Your yield will be larger. It will not look quite as nice, be as clear or taste as good. It will still be better than store bought.
If you can't get Seville oranges, try any orange or citrus fruit.
If you scald a batch SLIGHTLY, it still may be good - taste it. I made an excellent dark caramelized marmalade once by accident.
Some recipes call for retaining the pith and seeds to extract the natural pectin. I would rather have consistency and use No-Name pectin crystals purchased on sale. I find the liquid pectin too expensive.
Once you have made several batches, you may be able to make it without a recipe as I do. Cook peel until tender, add juice and pith, add sugar, melting it, add pectin and bottle. Boiling after adding the pectin may not be required. Read the instructions on the box.