Spread the word – we’re going mad for marmalade
Want to follow in Liz Hurley’s footsteps and make your own marmalade? ELLA WALKER takes up the delicious challenge
THE moment a new trend spreads around town, actress Elizabeth Hurley is all over it. So she had a jampacked lockdown schedule, making marmalade.
Looking typically wellpreserved, Liz, 55, posted a picture of herself, saying: “Lockdown has turned me into a demented housewife:
47 jars of marmalade nestling in my larder with more Seville oranges awaiting me.”
Liz’s ex and Paddington 2 star
Hugh Grant, 60, immediately thought of someone who would love to eat every jar until he was stuffed.
He commented under her picture: “Paddington 3”.
Usually my marmalade supply comes courtesy of my boyfriend’s mum. She delivers it in old wax-topped jars.
So this January, smack bang in the middle of Seville orange season (December to February), I decided it was time to scrabble together a batch myself.
You’d think it would be relatively straightforward: pick a recipe, boil some oranges, whack it in jars.
But once you start reading up on marmalade and comparing recipes, and then comparing those to your own (very specific) idea of what marmalade ought to be, the whole process becomes soupy with nostalgia, research and hope. You’re essentially jarring sunshine to unspool through the year. I begin by reading Lucy Deedes’ beautifully illustrated new recipe collection, The Little Book Of Marmalade, which describes a whole year’s worth of ways to use it. Then I got sidetracked by Claire Thomson’s classic marmalade recipe (her jars seem to glow), and revisited the wise words of jamming queen, Pam Corbin (I trust the woman implicitly). Then my boyfriend’s mum – our marmalade queen – admitted she’d misplaced her own mum’s recipe and in recent years has just followed the instructions on the netted bag of Sainsbury’s Seville oranges (and there have been no complaints). The gist is always roughly the same: 1.5kg of seville oranges, two lemons, 2kg granulated sugar, a huge slosh of water and much patience, should see you end up with six to eight jars of liquid gold.
Some people use the whole fruit method (the oranges are cooked whole before being chopped), while others shred peel and pith painstakingly by hand (this turns out to be very mindful).
Some leave the oranges to sit overnight, others have no patience (among them, me) and so forge onwards in a single day.
It’s while the citrus mix sits and simmers on the hob for two-anda-half hours (so the peel softens), turning the air of my flat to fragrant steam, that I realise I bought caster sugar by mistake and have to raid my baking shelf for the dregs of anything remotely granulated – this marmalade will be a three sugar type: demerara, white cane, soft brown.
The fridge is full of small plates awaiting the ‘wrinkle test’ (you’ve reached setting point when you can push a spoonful of marmalade on a cold plate and it wrinkles) and the worktops are scattered with sterilised jars.
Once you’ve wrangled with a massive pan of molten orange and decanted it into those jars though, the pride and sense of achievement is something else.
Eating marmalade is a small thing, having the time, energy and ingredients to make your own, a privilege, but if you can, do.
Paddington had the right idea all along.