The Book of Marmalade E-Book

C. Anne Wilson

• Herausgeber: Marion Boyars
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

Marmalade is particularly British creation, even though its origins lie abroad, and its charms have been exported to the wider world. C. Anne Wilson's book was first published in 1986 by Constable, reissued in Britain (Prospect) and the USA (Pennsylvania UP) in 2000, and now takes its place in Prospect's 'English Kitchen' series. It offers a history of marmalade in Britain from its origins as a quince conserve in medieval times, through its first commercialization in Scotland in the 18th century, to its dominant place in the British jam cupboard and on the breakfast table in the modern era.

Leseprobe

FOR M.C.W. & E.C.W.

This second revised edition published in Great Britain by Prospect Books in 2010 at Allaleigh House, Blackawton, Totnes, Devon TQ9 7DL.

The first revised edition was published by Prospect Books in 1999

The Book of Marmalade was originally published by Constable & Co. Ltd., London, in 1985.

Copyright © 1985, 1999 and 2010, C. Anne Wilson. C. Anne Wilson asserts her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holder.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data: A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-903018-77-4 ePub ISBN: 978-1-909248-27-4 PRC ISBN: 978-1-909248-28-1

Designed and typeset in Hoefler Text by Oliver Pawley and Tom Jaine.

Printed in Malta by Gutenberg Press.

Preface to the First Edition

Preface to the Second Revised Edition

I MARMALADE AND ITS FORERUNNERS

Marmalade and its name

Melomeli and cidonitum: the ancient world

Chardequynce into marmelada: the medieval world

II ‘FOREIGN AND HOME-BRED MARMALADES’:TUDOR AND STUART ENGLAND

Marmelado and codiniac

Marmalade and quidony

Marmalade among the ‘Banquetting stuffe’

Medicinal marmalade

Marmalade as an aphrodisiac

III ORANGE MARMALADE IN ENGLAND: THE BEGINNINGS

Marmalades of other fruits

The first orange marmalade

Marmalade of pippins and jelly of pippins

True orange marmalade

Medicinal orange marmalade

IV MARMALADE IN SCOTLAND: THE BEGINNINGS

Early marmalades in Scotland

South Britain and North Britain

Marmalade at the Scottish breakfast table

Janet Keiller’s initiative

V ORANGE MARMALADE: THE YEARS OF EXPANSION

English marmalade: dessert sweetmeat into breakfast fare

Orange marmalade recipes: some new developments

Marmalade manufacture: the nineteenth century expansion

VI HOME-MADE MARMALADE YESTERDAY AND TODAY

Seville orange marmalade

Marmalades of citrus fruits other than oranges

Wartime and post-war marmalades

VII THE MARMALADE MARKET YESTERDAY AND TODAY

Standards and varieties

Vintage and liqueur marmalades

Production and marketing

VIII TASTES IN MARMALADE YESTERDAY AND TODAY

Quince marmalade and other non-citrus marmalades

Tastes in orange and other citrus fruit marmalades

Marmalade as a health food

IX MARMALADE IN THE WIDER WORLD

Marmalade in the New World: the early centuries

Marmalade in British colonial life: the nineteenth century

References

Cookery-book bibliography

Recipes

Historic recipes

Marmalade recipes for today

Marmalade cookery for today

General index

Index of recipes

Quince tree. J. Gerard, The Herball, 1597

The best white marmalade of quinces, later 17th century. Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, MS 687, No. 47

‘Sr. Kenelme Digby, Kt.’ Sir K. Digby, Choice and Experimental Receipts in Physick and Chirurgery, 2nd ed. 1675

Orange marmalade, 1714. M. Kettilby, A Collection of above Three Hundred Receipts in Cookery, Physic and Surgery, 1714

Orange tree. J. Gerard, The Herball, 1597

Employees at F. Duerr & Son, 1910

Boiling room at Tiptree, 1921

Marmalade-cutter. Harmsworth’s Household Encyclopaedia, vol. 3, 1923

Seventeenth-century lemon. A Book of Fruits & Flowers, 1653

Delivery-van from Robertson’s Bristol factory, c. 1914

Crosse & Blackwell’s price-list, August 1884

Seventeenth-century quince. A Book of Fruits & Flowers, 1653

Chivers’ price-list, February 1945

Quince tree. J. Gerard, The Herball, 1597.

Every few years in the correspondence columns of The Times the argument about marmalade is resumed. Its champions write in to say it was invented by Janet Keiller, by Mary, Queen of Scots, by the Portuguese, and they cite erudite works telling about the uses to which it was put. It seems almost unsporting to produce a book which will settle the argument once for all. But the long, complicated story of marmalade and its antecedents has fascinated me for some time, and now I have succumbed to the temptation to write it out and share it.

When the publishers asked to have the story brought up to date with information on marmalade’s place in the world today I had the chance to delve into its very recent history and realised that this is an ongoing affair, and that new fashions in marmalade are continuing to emerge, not only in Britain, but in English-speaking countries overseas. In some ways the wheel has come full circle. Marmalade was a very special gift in the reign of King Henry VIII. In the 1980s the ‘premium sector’, supplying expensive marmalades intended for the food-gift market, is the most buoyant part of the marmalade trade. But whereas we once imported our marmalade from Portugal, Spain and Italy, now we send it as an export all over the world.

Many friends and colleagues have been kind enough to contribute facts or recipes, or both, to this study. I should like to express special thanks to Dr Wendy Childs, Alan and Jane Davidson, Professor Constance Hieatt, Janet Hine, Helen Peacocke, Jennifer Stead, Rosemary Suttill, and Beth Tupper. My thanks are due also to the following firms and their representatives, who sent me useful material on several aspects of marmalade manufacture: Baxters (Mr W.M. Biggart), Chivers (Miss E. Greenwood), Frank Cooper (Mrs C. Hooper), Crosse & Blackwell (Mr R.H. Starling), Elsenham (Mr A.J.G. Blunt and Ms G.Sinclair), Fortnum & Mason (Mr K. Hansen), Keiller (Mr C. H.Blakeman), Robertson (Ms J. Meek), and Wilkin of Tiptree (Mr I.K. Thurgood).

Most of the older recipe books consulted are among those in the Blanche Leigh and John F. Preston collections of early cookery-books in the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds. Nearly all cookery-books from Elizabethan times onwards contain marmalade recipes, but the ones listed in the bibliography are the books and the editions which were used in compiling the present text. Individual page numbers have not been cited, as most of the books have indexes, so the keen marmalade-sleuth can find the recipes without difficulty in contemporary copies of the books, or in modern facsimile reprints.

Twenty-one of the most significant early recipes are printed in full in a separate section on historic recipes (pp. 140–149). The modern recipes which follow are divided into two sections, one for marmalades, and the other for a wide range of meat dishes, sauces, puddings, cakes, pastries, etc. in which marmalade is an ingredient.

Preparing this book has been a pleasant and interesting task, and I hope it will give pleasure to its readers.

C.A.W.

Leeds

May 1984

Marmalade, with its long history and special traditions, is now under threat in the British Isles. The large-scale commercial manufacturers report dwindling sales year on year, and reckon that the vast majority of their customers are middle-aged or well beyond, and the younger generations have never acquired a taste for this conserve - or for the breakfast habits of their grandparents. The number of long-established independent producers with family traditions has also dwindled. Premier Foods has absorbed Cooper, Keiller, Robertson and others. But the large conglomerates also readily sell off well-known brands if retaining them does not suit their current aims or financial position. So although I have updated parts of chapters seven and eight, the commercial picture may be quite different in a few years’ time.

But the rearguard is fighting back. Duerr’s has instituted National Marmalade Day, celebrated on 10 March (the date in 1495 of the earliest record available, at the time of the first edition of this book, for the arrival at an English port of Portuguese quince marmalade). An annual National Marmalade Festival is now held in late winter at Dalemain House in Cumbria, attended by enthusiastic home-makers of marmalade from all over the country. They enter their products into competitions, with a large choice of different categories, and some 600 entries were claimed for 2010.

Marmalade is also making some progress elsewhere in the world. The Japanese have now acquired a taste for it, and enjoy it not only on toast, but also mixed with yoghurt or dissolved in hot black tea or water. This conserve can without difficulty be made locally Japan is home to many different types of citrus tree, and Michito Nozawa, my informant, kindly sent me two jars of her home-made marmalade. One was based on Dai-dai (a close relation of the Chinese progenitor of our Seville orange, which may itself have originated as a cross between the pomelo and the tangerine); and the other made from Yu-zu, a sweeter, very fragrant type of orange.

Marmalade in Britain has developed and changed a great deal over the centuries and perhaps in future most of it will be prepared from sweeter citrus fruits. Meanwhile, in today’s world of fusion foods, new ideas for combining tangy Seville orange marmalade with other foodstuffs must surely emerge. Long live marmalade!

C.A.W.

Leeds

June 2010

MARMALADE AND ITS NAMI

Marmalade spread generously upon slices of freshly-made buttered toast: this, we like to believe, is the traditional English ending to the traditional English breakfast. Some would go further, and insist that the original home of the marmalade tradition was Scotland, and that it reached the English from their Scottish neighbours. Yet there is something strange about the name of this confection. Why should it derive from the Portuguese marmelo, meaning quince, when traditional British marmalade is made from Seville oranges (with such alternatives as lime, grapefruit, lemon or ginger marmalade generally regarded as more recent variations on the primary theme of bitter orange)?

And is marmalade unique to Britain? Its name is certainly not confined to the English language. When we travel abroad we find that in nearly every country of Europe people have the term ‘marmalade’ in their vocabulary - spelled sometimes rather strangely to our eyes, but clearly the same word. Moreover, it is often applied to a much wider range of conserves there than it is in Britain. One reason is that non-English-speaking nations lack an exact equivalent for our ‘jam’.

This leads to some interesting comparisons. Holiday-makers in Greece will receive on their hotel breakfast tables, along with the bread and rusks (and often pieces of cake, a nostalgic reminder of bygone times, for in the eighteenth century we too, in Britain, ate cake for breakfast), pats of butter and little pots of conserve covered with foil. Upon the foil will be the name in Greek characters, MARMELADA PHRAOULA , and beneath that the English translation, STRAWBERRY JAM . On other days the contents of the pots will differ, and the translations will read, QUINCE JAM, APRICOT JAM, GRAPEFRUIT JAM, ORANGE JAM, and so on. In every case, the Greek term will be MARMELADA , plus the name of the fruit.

In Italy, likewise, MARMELLATA is made of peaches, or apricots, or figs (fig marmellata is an Italian speciality) or greengages, or apples, or pears; while orange marmalade has to be defined as MARMELLATA DI ARANCE AMARE (bitter oranges), or DI AGRUMI (citrus fruits). French MARMALADE is defined in Littré’s dictionary as fruit cooked with sugar for so long that skin and flesh are completely melded together to form a single substance of uniform consistency. The idea is extended to other foods which are cooked until they turn into a sticky, homogeneous mass, when they are described as being ‘en marmelade’. In Germany and the Scandinavian countries, marmalades may be of any fruits, and if they are made of oranges or lemons, then the names of those fruits must be added to the word MARMELADE or its equivalent.

The British themselves have not always had their soft-fruit jams. The word ‘jam’ began to creep into manuscript cookery-books in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, and into the printed ones early in the eighteenth. It had entered the English language only about a hundred years before; and perhaps it had a middle-eastern origin, for there is an Arab word ‘jam’ which means ‘close-packed’ or ‘all together’. From its more general usage in English for things that were jammed against one another, the word passed into the realm of confectionery, to denote those preserves where soft fruits cooked with sugar were crushed together, rather than sieved, and could thus truly be described as ‘jammed’, or ‘in a jam’.

Still earlier, the soft fruits were sometimes boiled down with sugar to a very thick and solid consistency which had the name ‘marmalade’ joined to that of the fruit, for instance, ‘drie marmalade of peaches’ in A.W.’s A Book of Cookrye, 1587, and ‘marmalade of damsons or prunes’ in John Partridge’s The Treasurie of Commodious Conceites, 1584. But at that time, and indeed until well into the eighteenth century, the word ‘marmalade’ used by itself meant only one thing: marmalade of quinces. And here we can begin to see the possibility of a link with Portuguese quinces.

In Tudor times, well-to-do English families enjoyed a number of luxury foods imported from southern Europe, including sugar and sugar-candy, oranges, lemons, dried fruits and sweet wines. So when the Portuguese traders set off with their figs, raisins and citrus fruits, oil, wax and honey in the holds of their galleys, they could well have found it profitable sometimes to add a small stock of a local conserve confected from quinces and sugar, and called in Portuguese marmelada because it was made from the marmelo, or quince.

In fact, marmalade did first arrive thus in England from Portugal, and before long also from Spain and Italy, where the Portuguese term for the confection was likewise adopted. The earliest English references to marmalade are therefore to be found in port records, where the names of the shipper and his ship and the value of its cargo were set down, so that appropriate duties could be charged. But before long English travellers to Mediterranean lands began to bring back recipes for this delectable sweetmeat; and then marmalade could be made in England too, from home-grown quinces and imported sugar, which was rather less costly than the versions which arrived by sea from southern Europe.

MELOMELI AND CIDONITUM: THE ANCIENT WORLD

The origins of quince marmalade are to be traced back far beyond the sixteenth century, and its very recognisable forebears can be identified in the home-made preserves of Roman times, and in the recipes of the Greek physicians. The physicians valued the prepared quinces and quince jellies as aids to digestion, and recommended them for various complaints affecting the stomach, liver and kidneys. But the methods whereby the quinces were conserved must have been invented originally because people wanted to enjoy some part of their fruit crops through the winter and spring months.

The earliest system of fruit preservation was probably based upon drying; there is evidence that apples were cut up and dried in slices in Neolithic Britain.1 But in time other alternatives were discovered. When Cato wrote about work on the farm in Italy in the second century BC , he advised the wife of the bailiff to keep ‘a large store of dried pears, sorbs (fruit of the service tree, related to the rowan), figs, raisins...(and) preserved pears and grapes and quinces. She should also have grapes preserved in grape-pulp, and Scantian quinces kept in jars.’ Apuleius, three centuries later, gave further advice, which has been transmitted in Book I of Apicius’ cookery-book. Grapes were to be put in a little boiled water within sealed jars made airtight with pitch, or were to be stored dry in barley; mulberries were to be kept in mulberry-juice mixed with sapa (wine-must boiled down and reduced to a syrup). As for quinces, ‘Choose faultless quinces with their twigs and leaves, and put them in a receptacle, and pour over honey and defrutum {wine-must reduced to an even thicker consistency than sapa}; you will keep them for a long time.’2

So quinces could be preserved successfully in a state of completeness. But already another mode of preservation had been devised for them. According to the recipe of Dioscorides, the first-century AD physician, quinces, peeled and with their pips removed, were wedged together as tightly as possible in honey in a vessel. After a year they became as soft as ‘wine-honey’, a preparation for which wine and honey were boiled together and reduced to a thick consistency. {See R 1.} This method was a Greek invention, and its Greek name, mēlomeli (apple-in-honey), passed into Latin as the melomeli of Columella, and the melimela (honey-apples, with an implied inversion of the two parts of the word) of Martial. From this word the Portuguese eventually derived their word for quince, marmelo, and hence their marmelada.

Dioscorides’ apples-in-honey were uncooked, relying on long storage and the weight of the close-packed fruit to make them soft and sweet, and no doubt they were eaten still sticky from the honey. Columella’s version did not even require the cores and pips to be removed from the quinces, nor were they packed tightly in the honey which alone served to check corruption, and prevent its spread. But Pliny stressed that the air should be excluded in order to keep quinces; and said they should either be cooked in honey or submerged in it, which suggests that a cooked form of melomeli was also known. Columella warned that unripe quinces stored in honey became too hard to be any use, which shows the reason why some quinces were cooked in the honey prior to storage. Preserved quinces were sweet, but apparently tasted somewhat insipid, for Martial wrote of children being given melimela and also large, sweet, but inferior, figs, and he contrasted his own adult preference for Chian figs with a good strong flavour.3

The Greek name for quinces was Cydonian apples (mēla Kudōnia), because it was said that the finest ones came from Cydonia, a city in north-west Crete. It was not the original home of the quince; that lay further north and east, probably in those parts of western Asia where the trees still grow wild today. The term mēlomeli incorporated the ‘apple’ section of the Greek name together with meli, meaning honey But the Latin word for quinces, cotonea, came directly from the other section, Kudōnia; and by various mutations it produced medieval French coin, and our ‘quince’ (originally a plural form of an obsolete word quine, which must represent the English attempt to spell coin as pronounced in Anglo-Norman French).