Читать книгу The Kitchen Diaries II - Nigel Slater - Страница 48

It wasn’t, on reflection, the wisest of days to make marmalade. I had pruned the roses, the temperature was a degree or two below freezing, and the skin around my thumbnail had cracked open in the cold. Each drop of bitter orange juice, each squirt of lemon zest sent shots of stinging pain through my thumb. But the Seville orange season is over in the blink of an eye and sometimes you just have to shut up and get on with things.

Marmalade making is about as pleasurable as cooking can get. It isn’t something for those whose only reason for cooking is the finished product. If the process of peeling oranges, painstakingly cutting their skin into fine strands and constantly checking their progress on the stove is a chore, then don’t do it. There is enough exceptionally good cottage-industry marmalade out there. Go and buy it. Making marmalade is a kitchen job to wallow in, to breathe in every bittersweet spray of zest, enjoy the prickle of the fruit’s oils on your skin and fill the house with the scent of orange nectar (or, of course, screech with pain as the bitter juice gets into your wounds).

Each stage, and there are several, carries with it waves of extraordinary pleasure. I say extraordinary because it is not every day you get the chance to fill the house with a lingering smell that starts as bright and clean as orange blossom on a cold winter breeze and ends, a day later, with a house that smells as welcoming as warm honey. There is something heart-warmingly generous about marmalade makers. I can’t tell you how many jars I have been given over the years. In my experience they like nothing more than passing their golden pots of happiness on to others.

There must be hundreds of recipes, but it is the method that changes rather than the ratio of ingredients. Some cooks swear by boiling the oranges whole, then chopping them; others cut the fruit into whole slices, others still include the pith in the jam itself, while some nitpickingly remove it. I have met cooks who chuck their boiled peel in the food processor, some who add a lemon or two, and those who introduce a couple of sweet oranges. It probably goes without saying that there is someone out there making it in minutes in the microwave (and surely missing the whole damn point).

The method you choose will depend on how you like your marmalade. Don’t probe a marmalade fan on the subject of texture unless you are actually in need of a Mogadon. Some of us like ours soft and syrupy, others prefer a jam that will stand to attention on the spoon. I like my peel in thin, hair-like strips, while friends insist on juicy chunks. Then there are those who leave the fruit in whole slices or cut it into fat nuggets. In my experience the latter produces the marmalade most likely to fall off your toast while you are engrossed in Nancy Banks-Smith or the Today programme. Lastly, there’s the lot who insist on sieving their pith out altogether. And the lovely thing is that each and every one of us is right.

I like my marmalade to shine in the morning sun. A bright, jewel-like mixture with thin strands of peel, quivering, but not so loosely set that it drips down the sleeves of my dressing gown. The point of this golden jam is its bittersweet quality. It’s a wake-up call in a jar. That is why we eat it first thing in the morning. The bitter oranges you need are available for a short season in January and February.

I know I am stepping into deep water giving a marmalade recipe, which is partly why it has taken me twenty years to get round to offering you one, but marmalade recipes are very personal things and we marmalade makers are a proud bunch (which is possibly another reason why we give so much of it away). But here it is, a little pot or two of bright, shining happiness, full of bittersweet flavour and stinging thumbs.