Orange Sunday
Yesterday was orange Sunday in the Scott household.
Not that I knew it was going to be orange Sunday. I expected orange Friday, or at least Saturday, but no, it turned out to be Sunday. And I’m not talking mobile phones.
I’ve been looking out for weeks now for the Seville oranges, to make marmalade. They come at the end of January or beginning of February, but if you blink, you miss the season.
It turns out that Tesco’s, where I shop, never stocks Seville oranges. A friend told me a week ago that she’d got hers from Sainsbury’s, and made her marmalade. But somehow or other I never got round to Sainsbury’s, so thought I’d had it for yet another year – and after bullying Ed to keep all those empty jam jars that stack up in the garage.
Anyway, on Friday he went down to the local farm shop for provisions, and rang me up to say they had Seville oranges. (Strange, since they sell local produce. I’ve not yet seen any oranges growing locally, let alone Sevilles). Unfortunately I was on the phone at the time, so he tried my mobile, which was switched off, so he drove all the way home to ask what I wanted, then all the way back to buy them. And they say romance is dead.
So there I stood on Friday afternoon, chopping up oranges, scooping all the pips into a clean handkerchief (don’t have any muslin), and adding pints of water. But then I discovered that the recipe said, “leave to stand overnight”. That was it for Friday.
On Saturday I started again, but discovered that you only boil up the mixture and cook the fruit for an hour and a half, then leave it to stand overnight again, which brought us to Sunday.
Ed sensible suggested that we went to the small church this week, since the service there is at nine thirty rather than eleven, and I’m glad we did, since it took me almost the whole of the rest of the day to boil up my marmalade to setting point (tested by forming a “good wrinkle” on a cold saucer!) and pot it. Then I discovered I hadn’t enough jars, so had to empty out the coffee into a plastic container and use the coffee jar.
The end result? 18 pounds of really quite tasty marmalade (well, it is a recipe handed down from at least my grandmother, if not earlier!)