what a beauty, never seen one as big as that before

This little adventure started when Dan’s cousin Maura and her lovely Mum, Auntie Sheila, gave us a large and fully ripened marrow (Cucurbita pepo) when we visited at Christmas 2009. Most marrows seen on sale in the UK are bright green and look like supersized courgettes, but if you let the marrow reach a good size on the vine and then keep it somewhere cool and out of direct sunlight after picking, it will continue to ripen and turn a handsome orange colour.

I should also say that this recipe is probably one for the ‘home made chutney’ enthusiast. I love the taste and aroma of what it makes; but there’s a lot of work, and a lot of ingredients, for a limited number of jars.

David’s Marrow & Ginger Chutney

6 dessert apples, 900g unprepped weight
2 medium sized cooking apples, 450g unprepped weight
4 lemons
1.7kg of ripe marrow, unprepped weight
500ml white vinegar or white wine vinegar
400g diced onion
4x 5ml measuring spoons ground ginger
2x 5ml measuring spoons ground white pepper
1x 5ml measuring spoon cayenne pepper
2x 5ml measuring spoons ground mace
1x 5ml measuring spoon ground cinnamon
2x 5ml measuring spoons finely ground salt
6 pieces of stem ginger, drained of syrup and finely chopped
900g granulated white sugar

Roughly chop the apples and lemons, without peeling, but remove any bruised or damaged bits. Place in a heavy pan with 2 litres of water, and bring to the boil; cook for 90-120 minutes. This is to produce a pectin-rich stock for the chutney (the lemons help to release the pectin contained in the apples). Drain, reserving the 1.15 litres or so of liquid, but discarding the pulp.

Peel and de-seed the marrow, and place in your pan with the white vinegar and diced onion, and the spices and seasonings (but not the stem ginger or sugar). If your pan has measurements marked up the inside, it should read about 3.4 litres. Bring to the boil, and reduce by one-third. Then add the stem ginger and sugar and reduce again, to approximately 2-2.25 litres, taking the temperature as close as you can to 103-104C.

Meanwhile, make sure your jam jars are washed and clean, and sterilise them by putting them in an oven at 140C for at least 10 minutes. Then fill your jars with the hot chutney (should make four 450g jars or 5 400g jars) and cover immediately.

If you use acid- and vinegar-proof screw-top metal lids, the chutney will retain its moisture content and remain quite soft, but if you use cellophane covers held in place with elastic bands, some of the moisture will gradually evaporate, giving you a denser chutney.

The facts are that sugar almost doubled in price from 2008 to 2009, and higher fruit and packaging costs will have put some brands under pressure. But maybe something else is going on. Bread and butter sales aren’t suffering. Surely it’s not too big a leap to grasp that when we’re eking out the little dosh we have on higher grocery bills we might dump the jars that are a bit crap.

Wilkin & Sons, the manufacturers of Tiptree conserves, report that sales of Thick Cut Tawny orange marmalade, their most expensive variety, rose by 25% last year, and I’m willing to believe that while the bland mid-market may be in decline, affordable (if small) luxuries become even more desirable when times are tough.

[pull]At the World Marmalade Festival in Cumbria – held in February – the number of entries goes up by half each year.[/pull]

Yet behind all of this, I can’t help but detect an increase in the number of people making their own. At the World Marmalade Festival in Cumbria – held in February – the number of entries goes up by half each year.  Ok, we expect a grand total of 500 jars this year, but still it’s growing. For some it’s an economy, but many it’s the sheer pleasure of it; in both the making and eating.

Seville orange marmalade is something wonderful; in essence, a curious suspension of fragrant, sweet and bitter oils, the peel simmered until tender then mixed with an acid, usually the juice of the fruit or citric acid, and sugar. All this is simmered to 104C then held at that temperature until a gel forms that holds the peel, floating effortlessly. Like breadmaking, it has an apparent simplicity that masks a complex science but one that suits home cooking easily. With the main Seville orange crop arriving slightly late this year, there’s still plenty of time to join in, and you don’t have to make enough to feed the entire neighbourhood.

A small batch of clear Seville orange marmalade

This isn’t the most energy efficient recipe as it only makes about 3 jars of marmalade, but it saves wasting ingredients if you just want to try making enough for yourself. Think of this as a guide rather than the never-fail recipe. For that insight you need to turn to an expert like Pam Corbin and her River Cottage handbook on marmalade. Arm yourself with some muslin, string, a good heavy-based saucepan and buy or borrow a proper sugar thermometer.

400g Seville oranges (about four)

1 lemon

1 litre water

800g white sugar

1 tsp soft dark brown sugar (optional but it makes the colour rosier)

With a potato peeler or sharp knife remove all the orange zest in strips, cut away any white pith then shred the zest finely and tie it in a small square of muslin. Finely slice the oranges, pith, flesh, juice and all, with the whole lemon, into a heavy saucepan, add the water and your muslin bag of zest and simmer for about 2 hours until the pith is utterly tender.

Pick out the bag holding the zest, and leave this to drain on a plate. Line a colander with a few layers of muslin, place over a bowl, tip in the entire contents of the pan, and leave it to drip undisturbed for an hour. You could squeeze any remaining juice from the pith, but it will make the marmalade slightly cloudy.

Discard the pith and pips, and measure the liquid in the bowl. You should have about 750 ml. Boil it down if you have more, or top it up with water if you have less, but make sure you have all of the liquid that can be saved from cooking the pith as this will contain the vital pectin that make the marmalade set.

Return the liquid to the saucepan, empty in the zest from the bag, and add the sugar. Bring to the boil, then quickly simmer until it reaches 104C and try and hold it at that temperature for about 5 minutes. A spoonful on a cold saucer should form a crinkly skin after cooling for 5 minutes. If it doesn’t, then try simmering a few minutes more but you may have to settle for soft-set. Then switch off the heat, leave for 20 minutes, spoon the marmalade into hot sterilized jars, seal with a cellophane lid and rubber band and leave somewhere cool overnight to properly set to a jelly..

Other fruity little numbers:

Other fruits give curious flavours to marmalade, related but strangely different to the fresh fruit. Lemons taste of sherbert, navel oranges taste like caramel, and grapefruit has much more complexity. But they need a little help to set if they’re not young and almost straight from the tree. What I do is take a chopped Bramley apple and 500ml water, puree this in a blender, then add the strained liquid (but not the pulp) to the pot when I cook the fruit. The pectin contained in the apple will ensure a good set with even tricky fruit like navel oranges.

World Marmalade Festival at Dalemain, Cumbria, 14^th February 2010, www.marmaladefestival.com

french bean & tomato relish

The thing that has surprised me most with this year’s first steps in growing vegetables has been just how many beans you get from a few plants tucked in amongst the flowers. First to crop were the dwarf beans, then the runner beans kicked in (and have been amazingly productive, even climbing over the fence into next door’s garden and supplying our lovely neighbour with a few beans). We thought our french beans were a failure, but in fact they were just later coming into production than everything else, and are now also cropping well.

So having tamed our tomatoes, the beans had to have my attention next. I searched the internet but almost every recipe I came up with was basically the same rather dull-looking old WI recipe, trotted out under different names but all apparently designed to produce a thin, mustardy, vinegary ‘piccalilli’-style of preserve, which wasn’t what I wanted.

So I decided to create my own, almost ‘sweet & sour’ French Bean & Tomato Relish. It’s a softer set than the chutney I was making, and I feel that it makes the most of the beans themselves and will be a great accompaniment to British cheeses or cold meats.

David’s French Bean & Tomato Relish

1kg french beans, topped, tailed and cut into 2.5cm pieces
1.3kg red tomatoes, quartered
2 medium onions (400g unpeeled weight)
1 tsp salt
100g unpeeled weight fresh ginger root, finely chopped
8 cloves of garlic, chopped
2 tsp ground white pepper
seeds of 15 cardamom pods
2 tsp ground cumin
2 tsp fenugreek seeds
3 dried red chillies
500ml white malt vinegar

575g soft dark or Demerara sugar
25g cornflour, slaked with a very little water

Chop the tomatoes and onions and put in a large heavy pan. Add everything but the beans, sugar and cornflour and stew for 1-1½ hours until much reduced. Meanwhile, drop the beans into boiling water and cook until just tender; drain, and throw into a large quantity of iced cold water, to halt the cooking. When quite cold, drain again. Add the sugar to the reduced tomato mixture and cook down for 20 minutes; add the beans, cook until hot, then spoon out 300ml of the cooking liquid; mix with the slaked cornflour, return to the pan, and cook for 10-15 minutes.

Meanwhile, make sure your jam jars are washed and clean, and sterilise them by putting them in an oven at 140C for at least 10 minutes. Then fill your jars with the hot pickle and cover immediately. If you use acid- and vinegar-proof screw-top metal lids, the relish will retain its moisture content and remain quite soft, but if you use cellophane covers held in place with elastic bands, some of the moisture will gradually evaporate, giving you a denser pickle.

a sourdough is a useful bread to learn to make

Once you get the knack of making a sourdough it will seem as effortless as making a cup of coffee. What I do is keep spoon-sized nuggets of sourdough in the freezer ready to make a loaf whenever I want. The day or night before I want to bake the loaf I drop one of the pieces of sourdough into a bowl with warm water and flour, stir it well, then next day I have a beautiful sour mixture ripe for making the grandest sourdough loaf.

I don’t really knead the dough anymore as time and science do most the work and, taking a tip from Elizabeth David’s “English Bread and Yeast Cookery” and later rediscovered by New York baker Jim Lahey. I just drop the dough into a covered pot and bake it in the oven. This means I don’t have to worry about getting the oven steamy and the loaf turns out picture perfect. You do need to be on hand for the four or five hours the loaf takes, but the actual work you do adds up to little more than 10 minutes. So you’re left with plenty of time to get those niggling bits of work done around the house.

Making a sourdough for the first time

This is the slightly expensive and mildly complicated bit as you have to devote the best part of a 1.5kg bag of rye flour to getting it going. Each day the removal of four-fifths of the old stuff and replacing it with new flour and water will stimulate the yeast and sour lactic bacteria to multiply with gusto. After about 10 days or so, with a little faith and persistence, nature will kick in and you’ll get a brilliant, bubbling, sweetly sour mixture. But don’t give up early! Just keep going until the subtle bubbling of yeasty life turns to a vigorous acidic powerhouse that doubles the volume of the mixture overnight. From here on it will be one of the cheapest and best tasting methods of breadmaking out there.

for the rye leaven

rye flour

warm water

Simply mix 70g rye flour and 100ml water together, sprinkle a 1cm layer of rye flour over the top to stop mould forming, then cover the top and leave for 3 – 4 days. What will happen is any bacteria and yeast will multiply and the mixture will ferment slightly. As soon as you see lots of bubbles the mixture is on its way. Now, every day for about another seven days stir the mixture really well, discard 4/5ths and replace with 75g rye flour and 100ml warm water, and stir again till it’s mixed through.

By this point the mixture should be feisty and acidic; look for lots of bubbles and check if it has a strong sour aroma. Then invert the quantities. Mix 100g rye flour and 70ml water together to a smooth dough, cover the bowl and leave overnight. The following day it should have doubled in size and be full of a network of bubbles.

To freeze the leaven

Cover a baking tray with foil, and scoop tablespoon-sized dollops onto it. Place the tray in the freezer then when they’re rock hard peel them off the tray and place them into a container or zip-loc bag. Here they will be fine for 3 – 6 months, possibly up to a year. Once or twice a year, or whenever you’re running low, take one of the pieces out and soften it in anything up 700ml water with a kilo of flour stirred in. Just keep the seven parts flour to ten parts flour ratio and you’ll be cool. Once it’s bubbling turn it back into a dough with 10 parts flour to seven parts water, leave it to bubble for a day and bingo: more sourdough to freeze for next time.

Making your sourdough loaf

for the overnight mixture

about 75ml tepid water

a nugget of sourdough from the freezer

50g strong white flour

25g each of rye flour and wholemeal flour

Pour the water into a bowl and break the dough up in it with your fingers. Then add the two flours and work everything together with your fingers, kneading it gently in the bowl until it’s evenly mixed through and the consistency of a firm dough. Then just cover the bowl and leave it at room temperature for 24 hours.

for the final dough

the mixture from above

100ml warm water, plus more (50ml) if needed

150g strong white flour

25g wholemeal or rye flour

3/4 tsp fine sea salt

Using your fingers mix the overnight mixture and the water in a bowl until there are no large bits floating around and the liquid is quite evenly sloppy. Then simply add all the flour and salt, and mix it together with your fingers until it is evenly mixed together. Don’t worry if the dough looks a bit rough, it will smooth out as it rises. You can add more water if you want more holes in the dough but the loaf will be flatter and not as round. Leave the mixture covered for an hour.

Next, remove the dough from the bowl and place on a lightly oiled surface and rub a little oil on your hands as well. Knead the dough quickly for 10 – 15 seconds. Though this initially seems an incredibly short knead, it is still important to work the dough thoroughly. Then put the dough back in the bowl and leave another hour.

Repeat this light kneading every hour until the dough is slightly puffy. You can check this by snipping into the dough with a pair of scissors. If you see a clear network of holes, the biggest about 1/2 cm across, the dough is ready. This tip works with any recipe as a guide to checking if the dough is ready to shape.

If the dough is quite firm shape it into a ball and place on a flour dusted tray, place the tray inside a plastic bag. If you’ve used more water and the dough feels soft, then take a tea-towel and rub it with lots of flour. Place the dough inside it then lift the cloth up by the four corners and lower it into a 15cm round bowl. This will force the dough upwards as it rises. Either way, leave the dough to rise by about a half its original volume.

Heat the oven to 240°C/fan 220°C/465°F/gas 9, or as hot as you can get it, and place a large ovenproof pot with heat-safe lid on inside. Take a 40cm square sheet of non-stick baking paper and place the dough in the centre of it, either by lifting it off the tray or gently flipping it out of the cloth. Snip or cut a cross in the top of the loaf then lift the dough and paper and lower it into the hot pot out of the oven. Replace the lid, put the pot back in the oven and bake for 25 minute. Then remove the lid, reduce the heat to 200°C/fan 180°C/390°F/gas 6 and bake another 10 – 15 minutes until a dark rich golden brown. Leave the loaf to cool on a wire rack.

crusty bread and tart lemon marmalade

Every year the Seville season slips by far too quickly. You barely have a chance to check whether you have enough jars, cellophane tops and rubber bands before you get to the market and find, bugger, they’ve all gone. I had an email from writer Gay Bilson in Adelaide saying “Heating up here, citrus almost gone, certainly no Sevilles, blood oranges finished.”

Now for a marmalade fancier this could be a dark moment, but I’ve become a dab hand at concocting recipes out of season. It’s mum’s blood that runs through me in that respect. Seasonality was no obstacle for her. If an ingredient wasn’t available a competitive lobe in her brain was prodded and sent a rush of inventive adrenalin through her.

Marmalade making, in particular, was a boundary-free habit for mum, unconstrained by strict seasons or recipes and her choices were dictated more by her appetite and mood. Weekends in Boronia, where I grew up, were often filled with the heady and unmistakeable citrus and caramel aroma of simmering marmalade.

Now mum’s got her eyes on a neighbour’s grapefruit tree, giving the fruits a weekly squeeze to see if they’re ready; she’s a devil when she gets her eyes on a nice piece of fruit. I’m back this November and she’s got a marmalade session planned, so finally we’ll get in the kitchen and work together.

I’ll personally courier a jar from this batch back to England for the World’s Best Marmalade Competition, held next March at a grand old Georgian mansion called Dalemain in Cumbria. Right now my mum will be our first Australian entrant. Ok, strictly she can’t win as I’m one of the patrons of the festival. But then I can tell her, “Mum, you were robbed. That gold should have been yours.”

The festival has been steaming ahead for four years now, and I’ve been lending a hand for three. Started by Jane Hasell-McCosh in 2006 it began so quietly with just one category for a classic Seville marmalade judged to strict Cumbria Women’s Institute regulations, and a few dozen entries. But the next year it rocketed to fame, with hundreds of entries, from tart lemon jellies to dark boozy Oxford marmalade.

Though jars are posted from all over the world for the competition, the festival is surely only warming up until they get some Australian entries. Until now, a big fat zero. I’m sure that there must be dozens of jars with prize-winning potential tucked away in Melbourne cupboards. Multiply that by the other states and we could give the world another gold medal thrashing, just like in swimming.

There’s still time to make some: alongside grapefruit you should be able to grab a good crop of firm, thick-skinned lemons and tart new season Valencia oranges before Christmas. And getting them quickly off the tree and into the pot is one of the secrets to capturing a magnificent flavour and jelly in that jar. A secret many of you know already.

For cooks in Australia the tradition of making marmalade has flourished over the last century perhaps more readily than in Britain. An abundance of citrus trees, and the relative ease with which they grow in Australia, means that unlike the British cook waiting for shipments from Spain, Israel and South Africa, cooks like my mum don’t have to look too far to find someone with more fruit than time to use it.

Anyone with access to a fruit tree, or fruit that hasn’t sat for months in a chilled warehouse as it often does here in Britain, has a clear advantage in the marmalade stakes and it’s to do with both flavour and the way marmalade achieves a jellied set. Very sweet ripe fruit, when boiled with extra sugar, can taste cloying and will lack the complexity of flavour the fresh fruit had.

The other problem is that the ripening process involves the disintegration of pectin, a carbohydrate normally found in most under-ripe fruit, and it’s the pectin that bonds the liquid and sugar into a jelly. So this could either turn a happy plan to make a jar or two into a predatory hunt through fields and supermarket aisles to grab the perfect fruit, or just involve accepting that the marmalade with be runny and soft.

For centuries cooks have encouraged their marmalades and jams to set with a little help from apples or other pectin-rich sources. In Victorian England it was a jail offence to adulterate commercial marmalade with apple pectin, but for the home cook it just made good sense. Today, it’s even more practical when there’s a surplus of fruit that’s too ripe to set on it’s own.

I asked writer and cook Gay Bilson about her approach. “The Time Life Good Cook volume on preserving has a very good section on jam and jelly making, and that taught me how to make a pectin ‘stock’ from quinces and apples when they are fruiting on my trees and not too ripe.”

This technique helps fruit with magnificent flavour but lacking in jelly power to set well, when combined with a proportion of pectin stock. If you can snatch a kilo of unripe apples, preferably cookers, from a tree then the process is easy.

Without coring or peeling, just chop the apples and place them in a pan. Cover with water, simmer 30 minutes until soft, then strain the fruit through a muslin cloth overnight. You can add more water to the apple pulp to flush more pectin out. Simmer the strained liquid until you have about 750ml. Spoon a tsp into a ramekin, pour in a little methylated spirit. If the stock forms a thick clot of jelly then it’s ready; if it’s very soft then reduce the liquid more and test again. Always throw the test mixture away. Don’t put it back in the pot, as methylated spirits is toxic.

To check if you’ll need the pectin stock, perform this ‘meths test’ on your jam or marmalade cooking liquid, once it’s reduced but before you add the sugar. If a tsp doesn’t clot, then add roughly 100ml of pectin stock to every 700ml of fruit and cooking liquid, then check again before adding your sugar and continuing with your recipe.

France’s Christine Ferber suggests making a fresh apple stock for many of her recipes, but lately I’ve been adding a sieved, ultra-fine and very liquid apple puree straight into the pan before cooking the fruit. The resulting jelly is translucent rather than glass-like, but I’m happy with that. The citrus flavour is strong, and it works a treat with tricky fruit like Valencia oranges.

Even for practiced hands the set can sometimes be too soft or firm. Accepting this can feel like defeat but really what you’re left with is still a rich and fragrant reminder of the fruit. When stirred into a bowl of yoghurt or spread across the base of a tart it will still taste and appear perfect even if you know otherwise.

Really, the flavour is the most important aspect of the best marmalade. For the judges at the marmalade competition, the jars that achieve the brightest fruit flavour and colour will be awarded gold, and I’ve seen many different styles win. From many different countries. But no Australian entry, yet.

The World’s Original Marmalade Festival and Best Marmalade Competition at Dalemain Mansion, Cumbria, UK, 13th and 14th February 2010. For further details and an entry form go to www.marmaladefestival.com