Marmalade days – again

05 Jan Marmalade days – again

That time of year again. Very early this year. Had me wondering if it was a hotter year in southern Spain so that the Seville orange crop ripened more quickly. Or if they made haste across the Channel before the Brexit clock ran down fully, finally, and mirthlessly and we all turned into … there must be a word to describe our new status. Exiles, Euro-has-beens, aliens. As aliens, we will still want marmalade. 

The oranges arrived with the delivery from Waitrose. Nicely boxed, a tasteful blue as a poignant reminder of European days. A band of black like the armband footballers wear when football royalty has died. Seems apt. Three boxes. I’ll need three more eventually. It’s such a big thing in our house that I make several batches. Last year I made five and they lasted till the beginning of November. Not bad. I give too much away, apparently, according to my husband. But gifts of homemade stuff are precious. It’s a tradition inherited from generations of women before me – small offerings with big hearts. Something thought about, planned, made, wrapped and given. 

I was thinking about this yesterday, chatting to a friend about knitting needles. She’d called to discuss sizes and shapes, circular and double-pointed, this and that. You’d have to be a knitter to know that such conversations can be enthralling and eye-opening, that they lead into all sorts of gentle and thoughtful places – life, children, grandparents, the past, the future – and that with each one you learn something. About knitting and about life. Anyway, I was just starting to squeeze and chop when she called, so, of course, we talked marmalade as well. She’s a woman who gives generously of herself in lots of ways all year long. Come Christmas, she spends days baking and making, filling bags with biscotti and Florentines and jars with four-fruit marmalade, tying bows onto cellophane-wrapped culinary treasures and sprinkling in a lot of love. Attaching hand-written cards. Gifts for friends. The thoughtfulness is quite beautiful. 

We said goodbye and I returned to my task. Slicing through the oranges to show their shiny faces mottled with pips like a serious dose of acne. Seville oranges strike me as an evolutionary aberration. How have they survived? Where do they sit in the food chain? I mean, what animal is going to tuck into one of these? You’d never peel one and eat it segment by segment unless you have a serious gastric disorder or are determined to get one, and a very funny sense of taste. And yet, chop them, add water, sugar and heat and you have this sublime deep amber goo that makes breakfast the best meal of the day. 

Best to have most of the day to invest yourself in the whole process. I fetch my grandmother’s big pan from the shed where it hangs for the year waiting for this moment. Take it into the house and clean it out. Dig out the old piece of muslin. Put on some music. And start. I like to take it slowly, the measuring, the squeezing and chopping, the simmering for what seems like an age, then the boiling, cooling, pouring into glintingly clean jars and praying to the gods that it will set.  Marmalade days are usually stolen from busier weeks than these. It’s been different this year. Far easier to carve out some days from the long stretch of January. Now we’re locked down again, I could continue into February if the fruit is still available. The diary is sparingly marked, mostly with events that will happen at home.

We had hoped it would be different by now. 

But some things remain the same. The house is filled with the aroma of orange and nostalgia. The taste buds go on high alert. The fragrance of slowly simmered bitter oranges is magical and comforting. Smells of wintertime and home. And there’s the hoping. The never quite knowing if it’ll turn out well. If it will have the perfect consistency –  the flawless fusion of liquid and solid. As I’ve said before, “the excitement of a perfect batch would be lost if every batch were perfect. The alchemy of fruit, water and sugar is never the same from one day to the next, one year to the next, one generation to the next. Its unknowableness frustrates and delights. The unpredictability is part of the joy” (Marmalade Days, March 2019).

Yes. There’s a lot of hoping.