We can all attest to the fact that Dad's marmalade was the very best we have ever tasted. It's true that Mom was the excellent cook. But Dad loved making onion butter and Gentlemen's relish and mayonaises and marmalade. He was really good at making condiments. He gave us all pots of this marmalade for the conoisseur and designed the labels. Granny and Mom carrying baskets like peasant women next to the cumquat tree in the Garden.
Cumquats From Giddygirlie
Unless you are quite old (and white or coloured) or your grandma left you a copy, you may not know this treasured old collection of South African 1940s wartime and postwar recipes and household hints, gathered in the name of General Smuts’ wife by Mrs Roy Hendry. Much of it is social history, but there are great recipes.
Notably, there are several for different types of marmalade, which involve 12-24 hours of alternate soaking and boiling. They take time, but are the simplest to prepare, the best to eat.
My best is:
1. Slice up citrus, thick or thin: 4 grapefruit, 2 lemons, 4 oranges.
2. Soak the slices, pips and all, in 2.5 to3 litres of water, in a very big saucepan, for 24 hours.
3. Boil for three hours or until tender.
4. Stand another 24 hours.
5. Pour in 5 kilos of sugar, stir round a bit with your wooden spoon, and boil the mix until it jellies on the side of saucepan, or jellies on a cold saucer, or hardens as it drips off a spoon.
6. When it is well on the boil, you can keep scraping off the scum that forms, so the marmalade is more clear later.
7. Have ready your rows of ordinary glass jars, well-cleaned, and dry.
8. Give it all last big wooden-spoon stir, and pour it into each jar almost to the top.
9. Holding each hot jar with a potholder, tighten the lid, and line them up in the pantry, for months or years. And when you open and start eating from a pot, you don’t need to keep it in the fridge. It is likely to be eaten quite quickly anyway. Remember, if you soak and boil, soak and boil, no need for fancy stuff, like putting the pips in a bag to boil then removing them, or sterilising the jars, or covering the top of the jam in the jar with wax. And, by adjusting proportions and soaking and boiling times, you can make some superb fruit jams – my favourite is cumquat.
By Tony Hall
Making the best marmalade with the least fuss the Ouma Smuts Cookery Book way
Unless you are quite old (and white or coloured) or your grandma left you a copy, you may not know this treasured old collection of South African 1940s wartime and postwar recipes and household hints, gathered in the name of General Smuts’ wife by Mrs Roy Hendry. Much of it is social history, but there are great recipes.
Notably, there are several for different types of marmalade, which involve 12-24 hours of alternate soaking and boiling. They take time, but are the simplest to prepare, the best to eat.
My best is:
1. Slice up citrus, thick or thin: 4 grapefruit, 2 lemons, 4 oranges.
2. Soak the slices, pips and all, in 2.5 to3 litres of water, in a very big saucepan, for 24 hours.
3. Boil for three hours or until tender.
4. Stand another 24 hours.
5. Pour in 5 kilos of sugar, stir round a bit with your wooden spoon, and boil the mix until it jellies on the side of saucepan, or jellies on a cold saucer, or hardens as it drips off a spoon.
6. When it is well on the boil, you can keep scraping off the scum that forms, so the marmalade is more clear later.
7. Have ready your rows of ordinary glass jars, well-cleaned, and dry.
8. Give it all last big wooden-spoon stir, and pour it into each jar almost to the top.
9. Holding each hot jar with a potholder, tighten the lid, and line them up in the pantry, for months or years. And when you open and start eating from a pot, you don’t need to keep it in the fridge. It is likely to be eaten quite quickly anyway. Remember, if you soak and boil, soak and boil, no need for fancy stuff, like putting the pips in a bag to boil then removing them, or sterilising the jars, or covering the top of the jam in the jar with wax. And, by adjusting proportions and soaking and boiling times, you can make some superb fruit jams – my favourite is cumquat.
By Tony Hall
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