January marmalade

Last week I did the traditional January thing and made a batch of marmalade. The fruit, known as "Seville oranges", "marmalade oranges" or "bitter oranges", appears in our shops for only a few weeks.

Bitter oranges arrived in Moorish Seville as early as the 10th century, and they are used in Spanish cuisine today, but not in anything like the quantities demanded by millions of British breakfast tables, so most of the annual Seville crop ends up here.

See how she simpers it, as if marmalade

Would not melt in her mouth. 

(Thomas Middleton, Women Beware Women, c. 1620)

The oafish Ward means a fruit conserve, but not necessarily oranges. The earliest British recipe for "marmelat of oranges" dates from 1677. Iberian marmalade recipes go back to the 15th century. They were solid and fairly homogeneous conserves, perhaps like today's mermelada de membrillo, a quince conserve cut into wedges and eaten with cheese.  Janet Keiller of Dundee, in 1797, helping her son make the most of an unwanted cargo of Seville oranges, may be the true inventor of what we think of as marmalade today, i.e. a spreadable semi-liquid that includes shreds of peel.

The Bitter Orange is a "species" of hybrid origin. Its scientific name is Citrus x aurantium. Ultimately it derives from two wild species, the Mandarin (Citrus reticulata) and the Pomelo (Citrus maxima). The same two ancestors, in differing proportions, lie behind the Sweet Orange (Citrus x sinensis), the Grapefruit (Citrus x paradisi), and all the small oranges you see in shops (Satsumas, Clementines, Easypeelers, etc). Broadly speaking, the sweetness and orange colour derive from the Mandarin, the size and firmness from the Pomelo.

Apart from British marmalade, the bitter orange also flavours drinks like Curaçao and Grand Marnier, canard à l'orange, and even Finnish and Swedish pepparkakor (though it isn't among the ingredients of my own family's recipe). It's much valued in Iranian cuisine.

Bitter orange is thought to have some of the same adverse impacts as grapefruit on people who take statins and many other prescription drugs. (The effect was discovered by accident in 1989, when grapefruit juice was used in a medical test to hide the taste of ethanol.) The problematic substances in Citrus fruits, which cause the prescription drug either to accumulate to dangerously high levels, or dwindle to such low levels that it no longer does its job, seem to be mainly connected with the Pomelo ancestry.

I do wonder if these substances would be likely to survive the several hours of boiling involved in making marmalade, but I've seen no advice on that.