Marvelous Marmalade
The next day I am invited for a blether, or chat, with Joe and Agnes McBride in Clydebank, near Glasgow International Airport. Joe meets me at the train station on a foggy evening, and we clamber aboard a double-decker bus, which weaves through the back streets before dropping us near the couple's cozy flat. Over tea and toast, Joe presents a squat jar of his sweet orange (Citrus sinensis) marmalade, which is brightly colored, fragrant, and softly textured. Like many Scotsmen, he is the marmalade maker of the household.
After too short a chat and too many sweet cakes, the McBrides pack me up with goodies for my train trip to Dundee itself. A somewhat careworn city, Dundee still bears traces of its industrial past, when marmalade making, book publishing, and jute processing dominated its economy. The story behind the fame of dark, robust, thick-cut Dundee marmalade is that in the late 1700s Janet Keiller, a grocer's wife, acquired a load of seville oranges from a storm-driven ship in the harbor. With her husband's sugar stock, Keiller turned the oranges into a preserve so popular that in 1797 the firm of James Keiller and Son was established to manufacture it commercially.
The word marmalade comes from marmelo, Portuguese for quince, which in turn derives from the Greek melomeli, a honey-sweetened quince preserve prescribed as an aid to digestion. By the late Middle Ages, the Portuguese were making marmelada, a sugar-and-quince paste similar to what is now called membrillo in southern Europe. According to C. Anne Wilson's definitive work The Book of Marmalade (St. Martin's/Marek, 1985), marmelada arrived in 1495 in London, where it was enjoyed as a sweetmeat and an after-dinner digestive.
Orange marmalade probably evolved as cooks experimented with making preserves from fruits other than quince. Sour oranges had been exported from Spain to northern Europe since the Middle Ages, and 17th-century English recipes proffer methods for conserving whole oranges in syrup "after the Portugal fashion". In the mid-17th century, the French chef La Varenne created a quince preserve thinner than its predecessor, using a method that likely influenced all preserve making. The first printed English recipe for marmalade—a jelly of seville oranges, lemon juice, and an equal weight of sugar—appeared in 1714, in Mary Kettilby's A Collection of above Three Hundred Receipts in Cookery, Physic and Surgery.
I am on a ferry steaming toward the Isle of Bute, west of Glasgow, near the end of my stay. It is blustery, and I'm looking forward to a cup of tea with Ronnie Kay—the taxi driver from my first day—and his wife, Doreen. They welcome me into their home, a former boardinghouse facing the sea, and we sit before the fire enjoying toast with Doreen's bright orange marmalade. She explains that she prefers a less tangy marmalade and uses both sweet and seville oranges as well as lemons to achieve the desired balance.
These days, the definition of marmalade has been stretched to include conservelike reductions of caramelized vegetables—but the traditional, bittersweet orange preserves are in no danger of dying out. I have a pantry full of jars of the homemade marmalade I brought back from my Scottish pilgrimage to prove it.
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