A Spanish ship containing oranges is battered by a North Sea storm

Crossing the Channel to the Continent, one of the many differences to Blighty that the doughty British traveller will notice – aside from how cheery everyone looks – is in the meaning of the term ‘marmalade’. Pick up a jar with that word on the label in a French épicerie, for example, and it will not contain an orange, jelly-like substance, flecked with pieces of peel, but something more akin to a fruit paste, and probably one that will not have any connection with an orange at all.

Scurry down to a grocer’s in Portugal and there is likely to be more scratching of heads and fruitless repetitions of the word because their marmelada – from which the English word ‘marmalade’ is derived – is specifically a quince paste (marmelo being the Portuguese for quince). The story is the same on other parts of the Continent. In order to secure a jar of the orange preserve that sweetens the toast of Britons from Aberdeen to Zennor, the wanderer will have to ask specifically for marmelade d’oranges in France and marmellata di arance amare (‘marmalade of bitter oranges’) in Italy.

Back in the late Middle Ages, variations of the term ‘marmalade’ were used throughout Europe to describe all kinds of fruit pastes. Though quinces were the standard ingredient, many other fruits were turned into a marmalade, mixed with some combination of honey, sugar and spices. At this time, marmalade was a catch-all term that covered everything from chunks of fruit preserved in a syrup to a fully fledged fruit paste, and could include honey, spices, rose water or even musk and ambergris. The English had their own variation, known as ‘chardequince’, which was rather viscous and employed cinnamon and other spices.

Even later English marmalades would barely be recognisable to modern Britons. A recipe for ‘Marmelet of Oranges’ is included in a handwritten book found in Cheshire and dating from about 1677. The author, Eliza Cholmondeley, sets out instructions for a preserve that uses only bitter oranges and sugar, and results in a sweet fruit paste.

It’s not until the 18th century that one finds something resembling the translucent jelly-like substance that goes by the name marmalade today. Mary Kettilby’s comprehensive tome A Collection of Above Three Hundred Receipts in Cookery, Physick and Surgery, published around 1714, contains a marmalade recipe that includes lemon juice and instructs cooks to boil the mixture ‘until it will jelly’. Even so, such delicacies were too expensive to become popular and so tended to be the preserve of the wealthy.

The classic British marmalade would not have taken over the nation’s breakfast tables had it not been for a storm at sea. One day, in the 18th century, a ship carrying Seville oranges from Spain began to make heavy weather of it as the winds whipped up the shallow waters of the North Sea. Although probably bound for Leith, from where its cargo could be carted to markets in Edinburgh, the captain decided to avoid the Firth of Forth and put in at the port of Dundee. Rather than have his Seville oranges rot in their crates as he waited for a favourable turn in the weather, the captain decided to cut his losses and sell them off cheaply where he was. He just happened to have chosen the city where one of the inhabitants was a woman who would change the face of the British breakfast: Janet Keiller.

It’s at this point that things begin to get a little cloudy. According to C. Anne Wilson’s excellent The Book of Marmalade, there are two possible Janet Keillers of Dundee who might have been that woman. One (Janet Pierson) is known to have married a James Keiller in 1700. Another, Janet Matthewson, married John Keiller, who was a descendent of the first couple. To confuse things further, Janet and John had a son called James, thus producing a second James Keiller. Both husbands appear to have run a grocer’s shop in the city, possibly one that was passed down through the generations. Unfortunately, the one key fact that could settle the argument – the year in which the ship got caught in the storm – is not known. For what it’s worth, the Keiller Company’s own history plumps for the later Janet and, as we shall see, she does seem the more likely one.

What we can be more certain of is that the husband of one of the Janets, a man with an eye for a bargain, caught wind of the sale. He availed himself of a good quantity of the oranges, taking some of them home to his wife. Unlike the normal run of oranges, the Seville orange has a bitter taste and is not the sort of fruit that was likely to fly off the shelves of the Keillers’ shop. This left husband and wife with something of a problem.

Janet Keiller decided that the best thing to do in these circumstances would be to make the oranges into marmalade, which would at least preserve them. In order to spare herself the wearisome task of pounding the oranges down to a pulp, she cut the peel into chips before boiling it up with sugar and lemon juice. Janet’s ‘Dundee Orange Marmalade’ proved very popular with customers, and soon fresh supplies of Seville oranges were being ordered from Spain.

In due course – in 1797, to be precise – the later Janet’s boy set up the firm James Keiller and Son in order to sell the marmalade on a larger scale. The Keillers were the first owners of a marmalade factory, cooking up the sweetmeat in large copper pans and selling it at prices that made it accessible to working people for the very first time. Copycat operations sprang up in Dundee, adopting Janet Keiller’s ‘chip-cut’ gelatinous style of marmalade, and the Scottish city became the marmalade capital of Britain. Sales boomed in the first half of the 19th century.

Although it cannot be said that Janet Keiller invented marmalade, the accidental influx of Seville oranges that wind-tossed day in Dundee influenced her decision to make the distinctive chip-cut style that was to prove so popular. The massive operation her son James set up – the first time marmalade was ever made on such a scale – meant that there were sufficient quantities for it to become a staple of the British breakfast, spreading itself first across Scotland, then across Britain, and finally across the largest empire the world had ever seen.