The amber nectar

14 Jan The amber nectar

It’s raining. Again. The wind is grumbling intermittently in the bare treetops and the squirrels are busy doing what squirrels do – running around, leaping from branch to branch, seemingly purposefully but at the same time appearing to be in a state of constant panic. January is a miserable affair so far, not cold but with a damp embrace that penetrates to your bones. The kind of weather that makes you feel a little mean and resentful, impatient for spring. But there are compensations. Indoors, it’s warm and fragrant. A large pot of deconstructed Seville oranges steeped in water is bubbling away on the back burner in the kitchen and it feels as if something is, for the time being, alright in the world. 

The one thing about January I love is when the familiar, slow-paced ritual of making marmalade takes over my life for a few days giving it a calmer rhythm. Life eases from a quickstep down to a slow foxtrot. This year, too, it’s a nice break from the dissertation… I’m abandoning the single young women of the 1920s on their emigration journeys across the Atlantic for a moment while I attend to the oranges, but also wondering if those women, their mothers or their grandmothers, made marmalade here or there on the other side of the world. I know my grandmother did – both cross the Atlantic and make marmalade and almost certainly in that order. That’s the thing about these seasonal rituals, they reconnect you with your past and allow all sorts of imaginings, both silly and profound, to play around in your head.

In the first phase of the process I halve and juice the oranges and isolate the pips. I like to cut all the fruits first and make a little gallery of them on the worktop, their wee faces upturned like a gang of excited bairns wanting to have their photo taken, smiling for the camera and showing off their bad teeth. That’s as far as I allow the anthropomorphising to go, though, because who knows where the temptations available in an orange – skin, flesh, membrane – could lead if you let your mind wander too far! Making marmalade is less anatomy, more a form of witchcraft, its spells and potions concocted in a steaming cauldron. But it’s the kind where good things come to pass – which, to be fair to the witches, was mostly what they were trying to do.

The phone rang as I was chopping the rind. 

“Are you busy?” my friend asked, “or can you talk?” 

“Making marmalade but not at a critical moment so yes, let’s catch up.”

And we talked about this and that, practical stuff about arrangements. And she said she had also made her first batch of the year the day before. And that set me off weaving a mental image of stretching out a sticky hand to clasp hers and then reach for all the other sticky-handed marmaladers I know. Seeing them getting all their equipment together: their biggest pot hauled out of the garden shed, the cobwebs and corpses dusted off; lining up the jars that have been saved from recycling and stored in bags and boxes under the stairs or in the shed or garage and sterilising them; finding the old bit of muslin and piece of string, both bearing the golden imprint of other batches from other years, to make the little bag for the pips; and, if they’re really professional (and I’m not so I don’t have one), the sugar thermometer to keep an eye on the moment of climax – setting point. 

I imagine a long wisp of aroma, like the trail of lights you see in night-time photos of moving traffic, connecting our houses with that distinctive, glorious aroma that’s both sweet and bitter and manages to curl its way along skirting boards and under doors so that the whole house makes your mouth water. This is the real amber nectar – forget that lager from down under. Marmalade is the thing.