Rebecca
BLOOD ORANGE MARMALADE
When I was fifteen, I was dumped by my first love, a boy nearly three years my senior, while eating a baked potato covered in neon-orange cheese sauce in the school cafeteria. Thirteen years later I still remember everything about that day—what I wore (a yellow T-shirt that said “Blondes Have More Fun”) and who I talked to, what we read in English class (Romeo and Juliet) and how, after school, I got sick in a neon-orange cheese sauce kind of way from the physical blow of how desperately sad I felt. A heady mixture of hula-hooping hormones and genuine hurt knocked me off my feet so intensely that my mom swears even now that my eyes changed color that day, in the same way that people’s hair can turn white from shock.
There was, of course, another girl—an ex-girlfriend—older and cooler and infinitely more beautiful than the bony elbows and caterpillar-thick eyebrows I saw when I looked in the mirror. For weeks I walked around in a fog, jealousy and betrayal roiling and churning in my gut like a disease, grades slipping and friends growing tired of me. One day I walked into my bedroom after school to find a book sitting on my pillow, lavender and blue with loopy pink cursive scrawled across it: Rebecca. My mom had placed it on my bed in an attempt to distract me from my despair, and upon seeing it I suddenly realized, astonished, that I hadn’t picked up a book in weeks. It was the longest I’d gone without reading since I started at age six. I was mortified at how far away I had gotten from myself, and I tore into the book as if it was the only hope I had of remembering who I had once been.
Rebecca is almost always described as a gothic romance novel. Year after year around Valentine’s Day it pops up on various Internet lists compiling the most romantic literature of all time. Next to snapshots of its various vampy, supermarket-paperback covers, there is always a blurb about the novel’s dashing and stoic Maxim de Winter, whose dark secrets and cold demeanor only serve to make him more compelling. Maybe it’s because I first read Rebecca with a broken heart, but to me this book is not at all romantic. To me, Rebecca is a story about jealousy, revenge, rage, identity, and how completely a person can be swallowed by a love that is neither equal nor returned. The narrator, a meek girl in her early twenties, goes unnamed throughout the entire novel, which I found particularly poignant and disturbing during my own heartsick identity crisis.
Daphne du Maurier always said that Rebecca was a study in jealousy, but she rarely mentioned that the inspiration for the novel stemmed from events in her own life. Just as our unnamed narrator struggles with the feeling that she will never be equal to her husband’s mysteriously deceased first wife, Rebecca, so too did du Maurier struggle with feelings of jealousy and inadequacy in her own marriage. Du Maurier’s husband, Tommy Browning, had been engaged to a woman named Jan Ricardo before he married du Maurier in 1932. Ricardo was a dark and glamorous figure, a woman who signed her elegantly written letters to Browning with an intricately curling R, much like du Maurier’s own Rebecca de Winter, whose name “stood out black and strong, the tall and sloping R dwarfing the other letters.”
Rebecca is brimming with mouthwatering food. The breakfasts at Manderley (the de Winter estate) are awe-inspiring, particularly to our narrator, who is used to so much less. There are scrambled eggs and bacon, fish, boiled eggs, porridge, and ham. There is an entire table of condiments for the toast and scones—jam, marmalade, and honey—as well as dessert dishes and mountains of fresh fruit. The foods are simple and comforting, but the sheer amount leaves the narrator wondering, after Maxim takes only a small piece of fish from this bounty, what happens to all the food that goes untouched.
These food scenes are not just space fillers. What the characters eat—and how they order it, eat it (or don’t eat it), and think about it—speaks volumes about who they are and what their positions are. At the beginning of the novel we learn exactly what type of person Mrs. Van Hopper is when we see her eat ravioli with her “fat, bejeweled fingers… her eyes darting suspiciously from her plate to mine for fear I should have made the better choice.” We learn about the narrator’s social position via food as well, when the waiter who “had long sensed my position as inferior and subservient to [Mrs. Van Hopper’s], had placed before me a plate of ham and tongue that somebody had sent back to the cold buffet half an hour before as badly carved.”
To me, the most poignant, character-exposing food scene in the novel comes at the end of the narrator’s trip to Monte Carlo, when Maxim de Winter proposes marriage over toast and marmalade. Without even a hello, Maxim barks at the waiter, “Bring me coffee, a boiled egg, toast, marmalade, and a tangerine,” all the while filing his nails with an emery board that was stashed in his pocket. The narrator misinterprets his vague invitation to come back with him to Manderley, thinking that perhaps he needs a new servant. He snaps at her, saying, “I’m asking you to marry me, you little fool.” In the confusion that follows, the narrator watches a fly settle on the marmalade, which Maxim brushes away from the jam impatiently before digging into it to spread thickly on his toast. This has to be the least romantic proposal in the history of literature, maybe in the history of history, and it is made infinitely more grotesque by Maxim’s food etiquette.
I was a young, brokenhearted girl, and this scene screamed at me. I had been wondering endlessly in those weeks what warning signs I had missed, overanalyzing every past conversation and trying to recall body language in the hopes that I could find the one shining clue that I had overlooked, the thing that should have told me to run, the fly in the marmalade. It is true what our unnamed narrator says, that first love “is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say.” Thankfully, for both me and our narrator, “it cannot happen twice, that fever of first love.” I have been loved and hurt a thousand times since, but none stung so much as the first.
REBECCA
Blood Orange Marmalade
I hope the fly hasn’t put you off the idea of marmalade. This recipe is made with blood oranges, but if they aren’t in season you can easily make it with any kind of orange available.
3 blood oranges
4 cups water
2 cups sugar
2½ tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 tablespoon grated fresh lemon zest
Using a small, sharp knife, cut the rind and pith away from the blood oranges. Discard the pith and slice the rind into ⅛-inch-thick strips. Slice the peeled oranges into thin rounds and place them, along with the peel strips, in a heavy-bottomed pot. Cover with the water and allow them to sit at room temperature overnight, or at least 8 hours, to help the peels begin to soften.
After the peels have soaked, place the pot on the stove and bring the mixture to a boil over medium-high heat, stirring occasionally. Reduce the heat to medium and simmer until the peels have softened and the liquid has reduced significantly, about 1½ hours.
Stir in the sugar, whisking to incorporate, and continue to cook until the mixture reaches 220°F. (If you don’t have a candy or deep-fry thermometer, place a plate in the refrigerator before you start this process to get it thoroughly chilled. Once you think the jam is thick enough, test it by spooning a small amount onto the chilled plate and waiting about 5 minutes. If the marmalade firms up and forms a skin, it’s ready; if not, keep boiling.)
Once the marmalade reaches temperature, stir in the lemon juice and zest and pour the mixture into two sterilized 1-cup canning jars. Process them according to the canning jar instructions, or store the marmalade in unprocessed jars in the refrigerator for up to 2 months.