The Marvelous Marmalade Story

 Guys I made the best marmalade.

Fred helping me research the recipe

Well, you might not think it is the best marmalade if you like ‘namby pamby’  thin clear marmalade. But if you like Oxford style marmalade 🍊 then this is the bees 🐝 knees of marmalade. My Yiayia used to make heavenly marmalade. I have tried, as much as possible, through guess work mostly, to match hers. It is hard as she always had that special ingredient that she would not tell you about!

I did chicken out and had a mix of thick cut and thin cut fruit - but next time I will be BRAVE and commit fully to the thick cut gooeyness that I believe marmalade deserves.

Now I have to write down the recipe before I forget what I did because instead of doing this the simple way and following a single recipe I found about 5 and did some marmalade research and decided I would to well to take a bit from each recipe. Mainly because I had no confidence in the recipe that said throw everything into a pot , cook it up for a couple of hours and hope for the best .Well it did not say that exactly but it may as well have said that because the next recipe I read told me that it would take 48 hours of constant attention, use 7 gallons of water , the equivalent to the weight of a small child in a specific type of orange, and, a wine barrel of sugar to make . And then to boot if I stirred it in the wrong direction I would turn into a toad - forever. I figured the perfect recipe had to be somewhere in between these two. But I was wrong. So I created a recipe based on an angst full, finger biting, head scratching, few hours of research and a memory of my grandmothers thick, gloopy, glistening dark preserve. 

I like to think that she and Paddington Bear would approve.

a well known eater of marmalade

My Grandmother - the best marmalade maker