“It wasn’t, on reflection, the wisest of days to make marmalade. I had pruned the roses, the temperature was a degree or two below freezing, and the skin around my thumbnail had cracked open in the cold. It seemed as if each drop of bitter orange juice, each squirt of lemon zest sent shots of stinging pain through my thumb. But the Seville orange season is over in the blink of an eye and sometimes you just have to shut up and get on with things.”

-Nigel Slater

That was how it began: with Nigel’s marmalade recipe. I love marmalade, and usually the stuff at the grocery store isn’t punchy enough for me, so naturally, I decided to try to make my own.

Marmalade was probably not the wisest choice as a first time project for someone who had never canned, jarred or preserved a darn thing. I could have chosen something benign like grape jelly and saved myself the peeling, chopping and soaking–but, for some misguided masochistic reason, it had to be marmalade. As if that wasn’t bad enough, I was taking my cues from two hard-core marmalade-ists (Nigel and my mother) who both firmly believe that real marmalade should be made with no added pectin. That is, if you do it right, the pectin from the oranges themselves should be enough to set the marmalade. Which means that you have to be quite diligent about buying the right oranges (Sevilles to be precise), or else things go horribly wrong. Anyways, at long last I found my sevilles (on the other side of town) and we went on a Saturday expedition to retrieve them. On the upside, we did find an excellent grocery store (two!) in the process.

The Peeling

Ideally, one wants to peel the oranges in such a way that minimal pith (the white stuff) is left on the rinds, and so that the rinds end up in rather lage chunks (to make chopping easier later on). Nige recommends a complicated algorithm involving a paring knife, my mother recommended a vegetable peeler. I opted for the latter. Perhaps the oranges were a little off, or perhaps my peeler just sucks, but peeling oranges with a vegetable peeler proved to be no easy task, and I peeled 3 knuckles in the process. At the end of it though, we were left with a pile of peels, and 12 oranges to juice.

The Juicing

This is pretty straight-forward really: just get 2 large bowls, and squeeze the oranges, pouring the juice into one bowl and chucking the spent piths into another–Don’t throw these out! Afterwards, tie up the piths, seeds, pulp and any other orange bits that are not going into the marmalade with cheesecloth.

The Chopping

Sadly, it did not dawn on me until I was halfway through peeling the oranges that I might want to try to peel off large strips at a time, to ease the chopping process. As such, chopping was doubly tedious: gathering up tiny little shards of orange peel and chopping them into strips. A good knife is invaluable. Afterwards, I added the chopped orange peel to the juice (padded out with water to make 4L) and submerged the cheesecloth bundle in the liquid. The whole mess soaked overnight in the garage, to leech all the pectin out of the oranges.

The Boiling

How hard could it be, I thought, boil with the cheesecloth bundle until the strips of peel are soft and translucent, remove the bundle, add the sugar, then boil some more. Well, the first half went fine, the peel became translucent and soft, in went the sugar, and then I waited, and waited, and waited.

The Wrinkles

The general consensus, according to the all-knowing web is that marmalade will set when a small spoonful put on a plate in the fridge for 5 minutes forms wrinkles when you nudge it with your pinky finger. If that last sentence made utterly no sense, don’t worry. It won’t until you’ve actually seen it happen. Having not seen it happen, I assumed, after an hour plus of boiling that it *must* be at setting consistency, and I just wasn’t doing the test correctly, or didn’t know what to look for. Oops.

That evening, the marmalade was still very liquid. And I began to get worried. A short post-mortem with my mother the marmalade expert confirmed my suspiscions. Apparently, athough this is never mentioned once in the recipe, marmalade is supposed to be made with the lid *off* and the volume should reduce by about 1/2 in the process. I had just jarred 12 jars of lovely diluted marmalade syrup. FAIL.

The Recovery

I have never seen someone look so happy about having to work on President’s Day as Dan did when he left the house Monday morning. Between the drama of the first failed batch, a midnight run for sugar, jars and more oranges, and the late night juicing and chopping, I think he’d had quite enough of the whole marmalade-making process. You see, I had decided at some point the night before that I would not only try to save first batch, but also make a back up batch, in case the first was beyond all help. It was about at this point that Dan fled to work, leaving me surrounded by marmalade in various states of disrepair.

I dumped all the jars from the first marmalade batch back into the pot, resterilized the jars, and amazingly, after 15 minutes of boiling, I plopped some marmalade into the fridge on a plate, pulled it out shortly thereafter, and lo and behold it wrinkled! In fact, in the 5 minutes it took to set in the fridge, the whole darn pot of marmalade had become suspiciously dark and viscous. What began as 10 jars of marmalade syrup was now 5 jars of ridiculously dark marmalade. I have not yet gotten up the nerve to try it. It may quite potent.

The failed batch of marmalade was saved, but there was still a large pot of orange rind, juice and pith sitting in the garage (the batch I’d started when I thought the first one was destroyed). So began the boiling (again). However, knowing what to look for made the whole process much less scary, and this batch took a fraction of the time of the previous one, and ended up a slightly less disturbing color. I have not got round to trying this one either, but I’m definitely more optimistic about it.

Marmalade Making Take-Aways

• I like Nige’s recipe, but it’s a bit vague at times. Really, some of us are quite clueless and need to have our hands held. Things that may be obvious to some (like “Boil the marmalade with the lid OFF” may not be to others).
• Good oranges really do make a difference. I think next time I will try to seek out organic Sevilles, in hopes of getting a sunnier marmalade.
• The bigger the chunks of peel you can get, the easier the chopping will be.
• Do not let the back of the Mason jar box scare you. You do not need a jar grabber or a wire frame or whatever else they claim is needed to sterilize jars. All you really need is a large pot and a decent set of tongs.
• Be warned, the floor will be very sticky when you finish.