Thank you for reading Between the Layers! Please enjoy and share this free post with your friends. The Bittersweet Beauty of Marmalade - No. 274Tasting orange marmalade with cheese at a local restaurant brought back a flood of memories from France + a very nice recipe
A LARGE YELLOW PYREX BOWL once went missing from our kitchen cabinet. It wasn’t used for any other purpose than making marmalade once citrus came into season. Like a big measuring cup, my grandmother filled the bowl to the top with cut oranges and lemons. She let the fruit soak in water two days before she dragged out the cooking pot to simmer down the citrus—peels, fruit, and all—with sugar until syrupy. My mother searched for that bowl, but she didn’t seem concerned about its disappearance. She knew some cousin was surely in need of it to make marmalade, and it would reappear later. Which it did. Mostly that bowl sat at the far back corner of the cabinet because we didn’t make much marmalade. To us children, it was bitter and foreign, like Brussels sprouts or dark red wine. We wanted no interaction with marmalade until we grew up and tasted it all over again.
Through the years, I’ve attempted jams and jellies, and I am being perfectly honest here, it’s been hit or miss. I don’t make enough of them to get good at it. And I once took courses in making them through the DeKalb County Extension Service in Georgia and became a ‘’master’’ fruit preserver, but you know and I know that skills only develop with time and a lot of experience. The younger me had better things to do than stand at the stove in the heat of the summer. Maybe I felt I wasn’t old enough yet to be proficient at canning. That comes with gray hair and hip replacements, right? But in truth, a trip to France some forty years ago opened my eyes to a fresher, looser style of fruit preserves than I knew growing up. It was one of the many things I found irresistible about French culture. The syrupy preserves seemed deliciously romantic and a world away from the stiff and rigid marmalades made by my ancestors. They puddled on the plate, and while they might fail the test of the ‘’master’’ food preserver or dismay a state fair judge, when you dribbled them from the spoon onto a fresh croissant, they tasted of summer. I wondered still how to make them. So when I recently had dinner at a favorite East Nashville restaurant called Margot Cafe, and a citrus marmalade was puddling on the plate with a slice of well-aged, creamy cheddar and sourdough bread on which to spread the two, a flood of French fruit preserve memories came rushing back. The pairing of marmalade and cheese—sweet, tart, salty, and bitter blew my adult mind. I wanted to make that marmalade. I couldn’t think about anything else for days.
I emailed the chef/owner Margot McCormack and told her I needed to talk to whoever made the marmalade. She said that would be Tom Huber, the pastry chef, and she’d have him contact me. The hours slowly passed, and I finally heard from Tom. It was like a good ole therapy session texting back and forth with him, with me divulging my desire for runny preserves, confessing my inability to make marmalade that I liked thus far, and begging childishly for his recipe. Not only did Tom agree with me about the beauty of loose jams and jellies, but he admitted he makes marmalade from a recipe they’ve had in Margot’s kitchen for years. Everyone who has done any pastry at the restaurant has made it. He’d be happy to share. And all of this was quite timely. I was heading to Florida to visit family. I knew there would be some interesting citrus there. I would make time for marmalade.
Fortunately it was February, and there was plenty of citrus. The best marmalade is made from a medley of organic fruit, and we gathered a few blood oranges, some local tangerines, a few Cara Caras, and some lemons from a neighbor’s tree. Walk down the streets in many Florida towns right now, and trees are bulging and no one seems to notice, but I’m the visitor picking up the random lemon that’s fallen to the ground. I couldn’t wait to get in the kitchen and pull out Tom’s recipe. And that’s how I discovered his recipe and my grandmother’s recipe have a few things in common even if they are not texturally the same:
And that’s it. Well, you need jars, but use any leftover jam jars and lids you’ve got. Run them through the dishwasher first to sterilize. Store marmalade in the fridge and share with friends. You will need some nice bread to toast and good salted butter for spreading. Put the kettle on, sit down, and savor. This experience of spooning homemade marmalade onto toast is just the sort of February thing your grandmother might approve of. It takes years to develop a marmalade palate, and when you get there, a door opens to the beauty of bitter and sweet. It takes both kinds in this world, something I’d love to share with my state legislators. Think I’ll go make a grilled cheese sandwich with nice sharp melty cheddar and dunk it into a puddle of marmalade on my plate—the perfect bittersweet winter lunch! - xo, Anne Do you make marmalade or have any marmalade memories?
THE RECIPE: Margot’s Citrus MarmaladeYou can begin with a recipe, but there are variables in making marmalade. The size of the citrus varies, as does the thickness of the skin. Choose organic citrus or backyard citrus. This recipe from Margot Cafe in Nashville doesn’t call for the fruit of the citrus to be added to the cooking pot because the fruit is used in the restaurant’s salads. But I chopped and added one orange to add a little meatiness to the recipe. Also, this recipe was a little thin to my tastes—even though I like a loose marmalade!—so I am offering a range of how much orange juice to add. Makes about 6 half-pints
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