Cooking, conserving and canning.....

Making marmalade

It is not easy to buy good tasting reasonably priced marmalade in our part of France, so R makes ours for us.  

There was a time when we used to be given large quantities of oranges each week (a friend of a friend managed a local supermarket and any damaged or past their sell buy date oranges used to come our way,  our friend was very partial to "marmalade anaglais") but sadly these days are past and our marmalade stocks had nearly run dry!  

Eventually R decided the only answer was to buy some oranges (they are at the end of their season at the moment but are still reasonably priced) and this time he decided he wanted to try making the marmalade in our pressure cooker to save on the amount of gas needed.

The recipe R uses comes from my very old copy of the "Good Housekeeping's Cookery Book", it was first published in 1948 by my edition is from 1966 when it was, 'completely revised and reset...with new colour plates and black and white photographs' ~ I love it!

Here is the recipe:

Three fruit marmalade  (To make 10lb)


4 lemons
2 oranges
2 grapefruit
6 pints water
6lb sugar


(The three types of fruit should weigh 3lb together)


1. Wash the lemons and oranges, cut them in half ans squeeze out the juice and the pips.
2. Wash and peel the grapefruit, removing any thick white pith and stringy parts.
3. Cut up all the peel thinly and cut the flesh roughly.
4. Put the peel, pulp, juice and water in a pan.
5. Simmer gently for about 1-1.5 hours (R can't remember how long it took in the pressure cooker, but it wasn't that long!!), until the peel is really soft and the contents of the pan reduced by about a half.
6. Add the sugar and stir until it has dissolved.
7. Boil rapidly until setting point is reached.
8. Leave to stand for about 15 minutes and pot and cover in the usual way.

R always checks for setting point by putting a small plate in the freezer compartment of our fringe for 10 minutes, he takes it out and then drops a teaspoon of marmalade onto it and puts it back in the fridge for 5 minutes, if the marmalade solidifies enough that he can drag his finger through it and it leaves a line or sort of crinkles up at the edges it's ready (I'm not very good at this and I always have to ask him to help, if you want to be more precise, you can always use a jam thermometer I think the setting point is about 222F or 105C).  R also skims off any 'scum' from the surface of the jam or adds a small piece of butter and stirs it gentle (this somehow magically dissolves the scum).

We made a loaf of bread for tea to eat with our newly made marmalade.  It went a bit wrong as I put too much yeast in the bread machine ~ but no one seemed to mind!

Our monster loaf!

W testing the top ~ it really is that tall!

With the children all having toast and marmalade for tea the bread and marmalade didn't last long.............. yum yum!!

This is all they left us!

Next time............