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