Food: Florentines and Seville orange marmalade.
It seems many of us have returned to a winter of discontent. Bright sparks are few and far between. As restaurant kitchens slumber or pivot, with a near-hysterical glint, to takeaway offerings, I have retreated to my farm looking for some external source of cheerfulness.
It comes in the form of citrus season. As my locale is far too cold for growing citrus en masse, cooking with citrus fruit comes with the added freedom of a purchase, rather than my usual grow it from seed and nurture it approach.
Back in 2018, I discussed on these pages my love of homemade candied citrus peel – something to revisit while we have a little time at home – but this recipe centres more on the use of marmalade.
But, first, a little explanation of where the recipe came from. The Australian culinary landscape has developed into a map where six degrees of separation is a constant. In
2004 Gay Bilson released her cerebral book Plenty: Digressions on Food. On a seaside trip to Robe, South Australia, it was my holiday reading. And in a curious twist, I was staying at Grey Masts, which I discovered was part of Christine Manfield’s origin story. It was a gentle layering of iconic female cooks. Within the pages of Plenty are a number of recipes, one of them for Florentines. I left a ribbon in the page so I could return to it when I was back in the kitchen. I had never been a real fan of Florentine biscuits, but that is probably because the finished product nearly always contains glacé cherries, an ingredient I’m not fond of. Gay’s recipe was more pared back: almonds, honey and finely sliced candied peel. It was rolled after baking so that it was thin and crisp, and then broken into shards, not cut into clunky round biscuits. The recipe worked a treat, yet in those days I had not started candying my own peel and was not convinced by the commercial offerings in this lovely version of a Florentine.
This is where the marmalade came in. Each winter I dutifully make jars and buckets of Seville orange marmalade, a favourite among customers, both in the jar or as part of a duck sauce or melded with cream and used to cook turnips. So I fiddled with Gay’s recipe, removing the honey and candied peel and adding marmalade. I was delighted with the result. The citrus pieces were smaller and the bitterness of the marmalade offset the inherent sweetness of the biscuit.
This winter I will revisit Gay’s recipe, which she notes was a reworking of one from Paula Peck’s The Art of Fine Baking. I will use my own peel and revert to honey. For those who are busy making marmalade though, make sure you don’t give it all away or use it all for toast. It really is a wonderful pantry staple.