Sticky!

I’ve been making marmalade today. I don’t know why I do these things, because they turn into a massive faff. However, at the supermarket on Tuesday a box of Seville oranges managed to wangle its way into my trolley and I knew for a fact there were a couple of bags of preserving sugar in the baking cupboard at home, so I thought, ‘Okay, let’s make some marmalade!’

And the exclamation mark of optimism was there. It’s a dangerous thing, the exclamation mark of optimism.

Marmalade making, in theory, is VERY simple. And I’ve done it before. Squeeze your oranges, chop up the skins and pith into size of preference - chunky, not so chunky, even less chunky - boil with juice and water for a couple of hours, add lemon juice and sugar, boil again until setting point is reached, put into warm, sterilised jam jars - bingo’s your marmalade.

Ha! What recipes never tell you is this:

• Your forearms and hands will seize up into painful spasms with all the orange skin chopping especially if you want, as I did, a fine peel marmalade
• Your fingertips will wrinkle into deep crevices from being immersed in orange for so long whilst you are chopping
• Your kitchen will turn into an orange steam sauna
• You will never quite be certain of ‘setting point’ despite trying all the accredited methods for ascertaining ‘setting point’ i.e using a sugar thermometer, doing the cold saucer wrinkle test, encouraging it to coat the back of a spoon. However, you WILL know you’ve reached setting point from all the blobs of hot marmalade that become splashed EVERYWHERE during the course of testing for setting point, which then cool and make a mess of your tea-towels, oven gloves, Aga top, cat called Bambino
• Your cat called Bambino will want to help every step of the way, especially when things get REALLY hot and sticky
• You’ll never sterilise quite enough jam jars. Recipe says 5-6 jars. Reality = 8
• Transferring hot marmalade from a large preserving pan into hot jam jars requires at least 3 pairs of hands, a ladle (fail), devil-may-care pouring (DO NOT go there - seriously) and a jug (success!) plus a degree level understanding of cause and effect physics
• You’ll forget you ran out of waxed paper circles to put atop your marmalade so will have to improvise with greaseproof paper. Your hand crafted circles will first be too big, still too big, marginally too big, then suddenly too small
• As you prepare to take a photograph of your marmalade triumph you will notice a teeny tiny fruit fly suspended in one jar, like a prehistoric insect set in amber. You will hesitate for a moment and think, ‘Oh sod it, I’ll leave it there. No one will know except me.’ And then you just KNOW that preserved fly will end up on the toast of a future guest and they will say, ‘Oh, a fly’ (especially if it’s my mother) so you undo the lid, take off the carefully crafted paper circle, rescue the fly with a teaspoon, perform CPR....no, not really, it was definitely dead via the medium of hot marmalade...replace the paper circle because you can’t be arsed to cut a new one, then shuffle the jars around so you have NO idea which had the fly in it
• You will be cleaning sticky blobs of sticky jammy stuff from EVERYWHERE in your kitchen, even the ceiling, for the next 3 months at least. 

We now have in our possession eight jars of marmalade, though. Hand crafted. Just 3 ingredients. Kept me out of mischief for a morning, too. A very long morning. These jars will last us a couple of years provided I don’t go crazy making marmalade cake. And when we run out, shall I make some more?

Of course I bloomin’ won’t!