CARA CARA ORANGE-GINGER MARMALADE
DURING MY CHILDHOOD, I WAS NEVER MUCH FOR marmalade. When it came to peanut butter sandwiches, my sister and I preferred the strawberry jam that came in a blue plastic tub with a white lid and handle, like a little bucket. My mom always had a stash of something homemade tucked in the back of the fridge for her toast, while my dad typically gravitated towards the squeeze bottle of honey.
The only person I knew who kept marmalade on his grocery list was my grandpa Sid. He preferred Smucker’s and liked a fine layer on a piece of morning toast. On occasion, he’d offer me a bite, and I always found it displeasingly bitter and not nearly sweet enough for my young taste buds.
It wasn’t until several years ago, while watching the movie Gosford Park, that I reconsidered marmalade. There’s one scene, in the final third of the movie, in which Maggie Smith’s character is having breakfast in her room with her lady’s maid. She lifts a cut-glass lid from a preserves jar and complains bitterly when she discovers that the marmalade it contains was store-bought, as opposed to being homemade. That scene settled into the depths of my brain and took root, sending out shoots that said “homemade marmalade is always preferable to mass-produced.”
Eventually, I gave it a shot. My first attempts were crude, though not entirely unappealing. I liked it enough to keep trying. In the years since, I have made marmalade every late winter, counting on it as talisman against the January blues.
Because marmalade uses the entirety of the fruit, I like to make sure I use the best I can find. Choose backyard or organic fruit, and wash it well in warm, soapy water. Living in Philadelphia means that backyard fruit is a fantasy for me, but during the citrus season, I’ll often invest in a box of handpicked, pesticide-free fruit from Texas, Florida, or California. Local Harvest (localharvest.com) is a really good resource for tracking down reliable, well-regarded citrus growers.
Marmalade making requires a few additional pieces of equipment that are rarely used in other fruit preserves. Before you get started, make sure you have a length of cheesecloth handy in which to bundle up the seeds and other pectin-rich bits of fruit. You can also use a large, stainless steel tea ball. Additionally, since these spreads are almost entirely made without the aid of commercial pectin, you’ll need a good thermometer to track the temperature of the cooking marmalade. I like to use an old-fashioned candy thermometer. I used to have a fancy digital one, but the probe stopped working after I dropped the whole thing into a pot of boiling marmalade. The analog ones are far more resilient.
In addition to tracking the temperature, I also believe in using the saucer test when making marmalades. At the beginning of cooking, place two or three small saucers or plates in the freezer to chill. When your marmalade is at the end of its cooking time, dollop a small spoonful of jam onto the center of the frozen plate and return it to the freezer for one to two minutes. The goal is to speed up its natural cooling process and see what the finished set will be like.
The hope is that it will firm up quickly and form a “skin” across the top of the puddle that will wrinkle when gently nudged with a fingertip. That means it’s done. However, if the jam doesn’t wrinkle and maintains a more syrupy consistency after a few minutes on the cold plate, it needs more cooking.
Several of these recipes call for powdered pectin. I prefer it to liquid pectin when making marmalades and jellies, as it has the ability to set more firmly. That’s not always a consistency you want with jam, but it’s highly desirable with marmalades.