Marmalade devient marmelade

English marmalade made in France

Gnarled, thick-skinned, dried-out bitter oranges – oranges amères or Seville oranges – are inedible and pointless to most of the population; they compare with celeriac for ugliness; and are hard to obtain. But if you make marmalade, the sharp, glittering Dundee-type breakfast jam beloved in the UK and beyond, nothing else will do. These oranges are available, though often fleetingly, in organic outlets and greengrocers with the right sort of postcode; failing that, the internet will usually oblige. My local magasin bio had a bin of them last month and so it was time to get to work, begging to borrow a big pan and stashing jam jars with lids that seal. And getting in lemons – fat exotic south-of-France varieties (Mayer) and in one case, bergamot mistaken for lemons – and obscene quantities of sugar. And I ended up making five batches of the stuff.

My mother’s mother’s recipe involves washing, squeezing, stripping out the pith and pips (which are boiled up in a muslin bag with everything else to deliver pectin and the requisite bass notes on the tongue), leaving just skins of orange peel. These are then chopped laboriously into fragments. Juice, pith bag, water and peel are left to steep overnight in water, then boiled for a couple of hours to reduce and concentrate the flavour and soften the peel. Sugar is added in horrifying quantities (about 2:1 to fruit because the oranges are so bitter) and boiled fast until setting point is reached (about half an hour if you have the quantities right). Meanwhile you’ve washed and rinsed the jars and lids and warmed them in the oven to sterilise them and so that they don’t crack when hot marmalade is poured in.

I take my guitars and computers out of the living/kitchen area because of all the steam during the boiling. It is a relief to off the extractor fan once the hot mass has reached its end point and quiet returns. The marmalade is left for twenty minutes to cool a little before the mise en pot, so that it thickens slightly and the peel doesn’t all float up to the surface.

The first batch was too good; set in fifteen minutes, so no overboiled taste, and the exact balance of sharpness and sweetness. Batch two had more liquid, less sugar, took longer to set and had a less rounded flavour. Third time round I overfilled the pan and had to deal with a spill during the final boil; a good marmalade though.

For the fourth batch – snapping up the last of the bitter oranges on my next visit to the magasin bio – I tried adding bergamots. Labelled as ‘bergamot lemons’ by the shop, I assumed that they were in fact lemons. Big, smooth, almost spherical, with a gentle bergamot odour from the rind. But they aren’t ‘lemons’ at all, and the result in batch 4 is a discordant blast of intense bergamot when you chew on a bit of the offending peel – though the surrounding marmalade is still fine and the liquid has a slightly spicy nose. What to do for the final fifth batch, with three big bergamots lined up, I am not yet sure.

The Pyrenees are a long way from Dundee and most of the way back to Seville. And ‘marmalade’ isn’t a word here – but ‘marmelade’ (with an E in the middle) is French for a jam – as also is confiture, which is perhaps a preserve, or a jam involving less intensive boiling. Whatever, here is a tried and tested process for raising the bitter and inedible Seville orange to a sublime morsel, suspended in a crystalline amber jelly and synonymous for many with morning itself.