Full of the warm South

I first started making marmalade seriously in January 2003.  Almost every year since then I've turned up at the doors or Sam Dennigan near the Dublin Fruit Market and exchanged €20ish for 20ish kg of Seville oranges.  20kg is a crate of oranges and it's an awkward load to lug.  I've tried a few methods: balancing in the back of a bicycle, decanting half into a 35lt rucksack, schlepping it on the LUAS to Bus Aras, occasionally even picking it up in a car. Whatever the inconvenience, I wasn't about to piffle about buying a reasonable quantity in a grocer and make a dilettante's few pots. There are certain economies of scale here. Most years, I've laid off some of the fruit on friends & neighbours, so that they can make some to their own recipe. Now that I don't work in Dublin at all at all, and as we have a small surplus from last year I was going to write off the tradition this year.  But my pal Aoife is coming down from Dublin later today with the oranges and we're going to slave over a hot stove until we have some jam-jars full of the warm South.  Looking forward!

Vergüenza naranja evitada

Orange shame avoided

Thank heaven for a leap-year: without it we wouldn't have made marmalade in February, let alone in January when Christians get the task done. When my marmalade-mate 2014 - 2017 Aoife announced last year that she was completely Out of breakfast preserves, I replied tartly that my marmalade days were behind me. Why would I get washerwoman's hands and spatter-burns all up my arms to supply all my friends-and-relations and various hangers-on at work with marmalade when I could drop into Tescaldidl as necessary and buy a serviceable jar for €1.80 the pop? I demanded with bitter irony. But Aoife is nothing if not dogged and when she repeated her call to marmaladey arms <ouch>, I was prepared to say yes. Then my mother died which consumed all the January weekends and February was almost done before Aoife found a window of time to plunge into the centre of Dublin and buy the oranges from Sam Dennigan. Because it was late in the Seville Season, there were several blue furry oranges in the box, which 'Sam' helpfully swapped out from another crate, not failing to chid her <tsk tsk> for not coming in January.

On Monday night [24/02/20] when I came back from yet another trip to England, I called by Aoife's gaff to collect the oranges. The following evening I did another triage through the crate finding a couple more blue furries but several others which had been up close and personal to the write-offs but were, like the curate's egg, good in parts. When I did that Tuesday triage, I cut the oranges in half to make sure they didn't house a world of spores in a dried out husk waiting to change colour. These edge-of-sell-by items I piled into a large saucepan and cooked up sufficiently to deter further fungal invasion. I was therefore one pan ahead of the game when I sprang out of bed at 0600hrs on Leap Day.

Inventory for making marmalade [R]:

• Seville oranges: must be orange; 
• large saucepan: may be orange, here yellow
• cold plate for testing: should be orange
• cooked peel; is still orange
• tea-cup; can be orange, here red

The great thing about about Deli O'Smith's recipe for marmalade is that it separates in time two processes essential to the gelling of fruit preserves. First you release the gelling agent pectin from the skin, pith and pips then you add sugar [the acid is already there in citrus fruit] which binds with the pectin [and increases the viscosity with dissolved solids]. Other recipes for marmalade try to achieve these two processes in the same time frame. That, dodgy, method is much more like to result in disaster: the sugar is caramelising then blackening on the bottom of the pan before sufficient pectin is in solution for the gelling reaction.

This year, because of the triage, I twigged that cutting the fruit in half allowed a more efficient packing of the pan, so that the ratio of water to orange was more fruity. Between 0600 and 0645, therefore, I had filled our two biggest, tight-lidded, saucepans with halved, cleanish, blemish-trimmed fruit, filled the gaps with ~2.5 lt water and set them to simmer for 3 hours.

The next stage of the process, when the pulp, the sugar and the fishes of chopped peel come together in a final rolling boil, is best carried out in a wide jam-pan with sloping sides to maximise the surface area and hence the evaporation of liquid. A modest simmer won't do the trick. With all that sugar and protein, the liquid will at some stage in the process boil up [and over if the pan is too full], so it is better to split the pulp into a couple of batches and do them in sequence. Not least because if the first lot isn't setting you can add a touch more sugar (and/or a squirt of lemon juice; whose acid helps the pectin to set) the next time. In the Deli O'Smith protocol, this stage of the process takes not more than 30 minutes. You can do it by the clock or check by putting a dribble on a cold plate to see if it will set there. You have to have faith, sisters, because over-cooking will set the marmalade more chunky and less spreadable: less is more. otoh if you want a darker brew you can/shd cook it off a bit longer. Always, the last jars poured from a batch will set harder than the earlier top skims.

Just about the time the two 0600hrs saucepans were finishing their 3 hour simmers, the rest of the household started to wake up and demand breakfast. Dau.II, who had arrived the night before and is ever up for a colourful cook challenge, put herself on the task of scooping out the pulp, and processing the skins coarsely through a Spong hand-cranked mincer to generate the "fishes" of peel in the final product. The pectin-rich pulp was simultaneously [many hands make light work] pushed through a fine pored conical sieve.  Each panful of fruit generated about 4 pints = 20 fl.oz = 570 ml and my rule of thumb is to add 1kg of sugar per pint. That is on the low side of settability but if you add more sugar it just gets sickly sweet and the bitter grown-up bite of the Seville's gets lost in the wash.

A couple of hours and several cups of tea later, we had boiled down four or five batches of (2 pint pulp + 2kg sugar) and aliquotted them into oven-sterilised jam-jars. That would normally be a job well done and a cause for cake or at least a round of scones as a marmalade vehicle but we were still expecting Aoife's party to follow her oranges down from Dublin and get cookin'. Apart from anything else, we were running short of serviceable jam-jars. Undaunted, we filled up the two largest saucepans again with clean halved Sevilles and set them to boil. Not a moment too soon, the jam-jar cavalry arrived from the Big City and by the time we'd all finished a Leap Day lunch that couldn't be beat, we were ready to process the next batches of bubblin' Sevilles.

The joy of doing things again and again before you forget what happened last time is that you get to know the process. Like medieval swordsmiths who, after decades of deliberate practice, knew the temperature of the steel from its colour, so we could tell when the marmalade was ready to pour from the texture of the boil. No real need for a cold plate, let alone a jam-thermometer. The other positive outcome of repetition is that you can ring the changes - we are not machines after all. Confident that we'd mastered the basic process we made i) a small batch without fish ii) a batch with extra fish iii) a small batch with cardamom and then . . . we . . . were . . . done. It was full dark before we screwed tight the last lid and I for one had been on my feet for 14 hours. The days total was just over 70 pots of the warm South. I hope my ActivPal accelerometer was impressed or at least recording. In the end all that's left is a generous handful of pithy, seedy, compost [see R]

New Year tunnel

Yesterday, I spend pretty much the whole daylight dayin the Yaris  repatriating Dau.II to the People's Republic of Cork. At about the same time The Beloved set off in the opposite direction running the same service for Dau.I. We did this because instructed to do so by the troika of NPHET, the HSE and Bill Gates. Old Bill wants us to distribute his Location Chips as widely as possible. I thought traffic might be like the last day of a bank holiday weekend, so packed a thermos and sandwiches. But I was wrong [as yet again!] and we sailed West on a truly gorgeous sunny winter morning. The sea was sparkling and the frost persisted only in hedge-shadow. We would, of course, preferred to run that trip after the New Year weekend but The Man mandated full metal lockdown starting in synchrony with Actual Brexit.

Bereft without the daughters.

But bitter tears butter no parsnips. I had phoned Sam Dennigan's Cork warehouse on Monday to discover a) they had taken delivery of their first truckload of Seville oranges b) they were open for biz until 2pm on Thursday. Their gaff looked truly shuttered when we arrived outside but there was a light in the office window upstairs and someone came down to let me in and carry off a 13kg fruit-box of potential marmalade. If we are not allowed out from home, I may as well do something useful.

I woke this morning <late, knackered> to a peculiar dream that resonated with the Annual Summer Camp we ran with/for the girls over seven years while they were still more children than adults: I was up the lane with a shovel tricking about with drains [as ever] when I heard a boinggy sound issuing from the 20m⌀300mm pipe that take the water under a gateway. After a short time a small boy, about the age of Gdau.I and Gdau.II, in now muddy white shirt and shorts, emerged grinning from the end of the pipe; followed by half a dozen similarly triumphant children. They'd been set a challenge, embraced it with gusto and carried it through to completion. There is light at the end of every tunnel! Looking forward to seeing how 2021 plays out: elbumps to all my reg'lar readers.

24 horas en Sevilla.

O for a draught of vintage! that hath been  

  Cool'd a long age in the deep-delvèd earth,  

Tasting of Flora and the country-green,  

  Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!  

O for a beaker full of the warm South!

Johnnie Keats

Keats was dreaming of the booze and was far too poetic to find oblivion is a feed of pints. Nothing would do but claret or some other beverage with beaded bubbles winking at the brim and purple-stainèd mouth. Silly boy, look what all that plonk [and a good dose of Mycobacterium tuberculosis] did for him, tragically dead at 25. Me, I'm more of an orange sort of bloke, especially if they are from Andalusia and too bitter to eat raw. I last made marmalade at the beginning of 2014, which my calculators tells me is three long years ago. Then, my pal Aoife bought a crate of Seville oranges from Sam Dennigan in the Dublin Fruit Market and brought them down for a marmalade meitheal. That post generated an unaccountable spike of interest in The Blob - as if my nerdnik readers had never heard of marmalade before.

In November, Aoife said that she was down to her last pot and was I planning making more marmalade this Winter . . . and, after a good bit of dropped batons and missed messages, it was so. We agree that Saturday 28th Jan 2017 would be Den Tag der Marmelade, and it was so. Aoife+1 arrived at noon and 10 minutes later the three largest pots in the house were full of oranges and water for a 3 hour simmer. Making a batch of marmalade consumes a lot of time but most of it is not working time. After 3 hours at 100°C, the poor oranges have lost a lot of weight, but have transmuted their pectin into something gloopy that will gel the solution if supplied with enough sugar and if the pH is sufficiently acid. My recipe calls for squeezing the pectic-rich soup through a muslin cheese cloth and I started doing that on Saturday: massaging a bolus of hot orange pulp with my hands.

Then I remembered that, since the last marmalade time, we had acquired a a stainless steel conical sieve, so I put the cheese-cloth aside and lurried the pulp into the sieve. A great improvement, and at the end of the day my hands were normal coloured instead of red and raw as an 18thC washer-woman's.  Having separated the gelly liquid from the internal fibre and pips, we added 3kg of sugar to 3 pints [the alchemy of jam doesn't require consistent SI units] of gloop and the skins ground in my old-fashioned Spong mincer. [for which see prev]. Two batches of gloop+sugar+peel came quickly to the stage where the confection would set at room temperature and by 5pm we had bottled 32 jars of marmalade; in the process using up about 60% of the crate of oranges.

The next morning, my support team having returned to Dublin with most of the previous day's production, I rose at 0600hrs to start another batch. It took a little longer because I was on my own but by the forenoon I had finished the 2017 season with another 2 dozen jars - some double-sized. That was more or less 24 hours after we started the day before. It's sort of mad. If my time is worth the minimum wage of €8.20, then 25 pots of jam costs €40 in labour and about €10 for materials. €2 / lb is about the middle range of shop-bought marmalade: Tesco Value = €0.49; Olde Time Irish 2 for €4.00; Bonne Maman €3.39.  This doesn't factor in the cost of transport from Dublin, so maybe marmalade making is, to paraphrase Dr Johnson's assessment of Antrim's Giant's Causeway, "Worth doing but not worth going to do".

I was so taken with the utility of the conical sieve, that I went round to lend it to a jam-making pal of mine. No good to me was her response. Her recipe calls for cooking the oranges and throwing  the whole mess skin-and-all into a food-processor. Clearly no washer-woman hands in that home either.