I should have listened to my own advice. I know how slow and painful the arrival of spring can often feel here in Northern Europe. A few days ago I was sat writing on a sunny terrace, but yesterday temperatures dropped back below 10 degrees, and today Brussels is showing off its favourite party trick of flitting seamlessly between sun and rain every few minutes. It’s easy, once the days start getting longer, to believe the worst is over, but spring has a coy way of taking its sweet time.
We’ll get there eventually, we always do, but until then, you could do a lot worse than engaging in some gentle jam making. Or jam eating.
Breakfast, for me, comes in phases. Until about five years ago, I was religious about getting a good breakfast in me before school, work, or uni. More often than not, it would be something toasted: a bagel, a muffin, a crumpet. When I was at uni, it was invariably porridge (always with a pinch of salt and a spoonful of golden syrup).
Then things started to slip, and for a long time, anything other than a pastry grabbed before work seemed like an organisational marathon. Somehow, making sure I consistently had something easily breakfastable to hand for the next morning was more than my brain could manage.
Thankfully, something shifted towards the latter half of last year, and, as if nothing ever happened, I am once again totally incapable of functioning without a decent breakfast. And with this rediscovery of the joys of breakfast came periodical obsessions. There was the porridge phase (still with golden syrup and salt, always), the yoghurt phase, the peanut butter toast phase, several egg phases. And now it’s the marmalade* phase.
The average marmalade breakfast goes like this: a couple of slices of a very seedy toast (for Brussels-dwellers I recommend le sportif from Le Pain d’Antan), a generous layer of salted butter (and it has to be salted), a hearty spoonful of homemade marmalade.
There is, inherently, nothing revolutionary about this, as breakfasts go. But it feels it. Because, for the very first time, the marmalade is homemade by me. Growing up, there was always homemade (by Dad) marmalade at the breakfast table year-round, occasionally supplemented by greengage jam to mix things up. Marmalade back home in Sussex was a constant. It was, indeed still is, almost part of the furniture. I never thought that much about it because it was never not there.
Once I moved out, I never thought to buy it, probably because of disparaging comments from my parents about the shop-bought versions that landed in my subconscious, to the extent that marmalade wasn’t just something that was better homemade, it was something that was only homemade.
Then, a few months ago, I was buying mincemeat and succumbed to a nostalgic urge to buy a jar of marmalade from a shop that sold Tiptree jams. Unsurprisingly, I ended up being underwhelmed by a bland orange jelly with barely perceptible slithers of peel. Each time I ate it, I felt like I was bargaining with it to be less disappointing than I remembered, but alas, my magical thinking failed me. It made more and more sense why my parents went to the trouble of making it at home every January.
So it felt like fate (you can make anything feel like fate on your fourth consecutive week in Brussels without seeing the sun) when my regular Sunday market stall still had bitter oranges in late February.
The excitement about imminent access to decent marmalade quickly faded when I realised I had been overly zealous with a recent clearout and had no empty glass jars in the flat. And anyone who knows Brussels knows that your chances of finding an open shop on a Sunday beyond a Carrefour Express are minimal. Not to labour the point, but to eliminate any doubt, Carrefour Express does not sell empty jam jars.
Fortunately, my motivation lasted long enough to wait until I had time to raid my local Dille and Kamille (a kind of Dutch millennial Lakeland, if you will), and I finally had my ducks in a line to get started.
This was my first time making marmalade, but I have made other jams in the past. This was sufficient to teach me one thing. For background, there is a widely accepted myth that says that cooking is an art and baking is a science. I don’t generally agree with this maxim, but if we momentarily hold it to be true, the logical conclusion from my experience making redcurrant jam is that jam-making is quantum physics - and I apologise to any physicists reading this for how I am about to butcher my already tenuous understanding of Schrödinger’s cat. As that hot, sugary mixture boils in the pan, it feels as if it is simultaneously an overboiled, unrescuable mess and the best preserve you’ve ever made. It’s only after spooning it onto a chilled plate and waiting to see if it sets that you can be sure you’ve reached the right consistency.
Something about this process feels riveting and fast-paced, and yet incredibly grounding: you can’t look away as it transforms before your eyes. Even before you get to the boiling point, there is something incredibly satisfying about making marmalade: it begins with a kind of butchery, using each and every part of the fruit: the nose to tail of an orange, if you will.
Unlike some contrived ‘zero waste’ recipes that make things of dubitable use or enjoyment from fruit peels we would otherwise compost anyway, marmalade makes something truly delicious out of the otherwise unpalatable orange peel.
It’s not just the peel that gets attention. Even the pips and stringy innards are crammed into a muslin bag that hangs among the peel and juice as they boil, offering up valuable flavour and the pectin that is vital to make the marmalade set.
Against the backdrop of nose to tail cookery, marmalade feels unique in terms of the pure state that the orange is retained in. There are other recipes that use the whole orange: cakes such as Nigella’s clementine cake, where whole oranges are boiled and then blitzed, to make a dense, moist loaf. Yet here, the inclusion of flour, butter and eggs means we slip away from the integrity of the orange. As Octavia Lamb described so well in a recent newsletter, ‘though you might think blending a whole orange into a cake, boiled or otherwise, would lead to plenty of orange flavour, I’m afraid you are mistaken.’
In marmalade, each part of the orange is not just used, but has its role to play, and is perceptible in the final product. Maybe I am dragging the metaphor too far, but taking that whole orange apart, then putting it back together in a sterilised jar, feels like bottling the whole universe.
The act of sealing something in a jar feels important. If you can preserve a jar of (albeit imported) sunshine even in the dead of winter, one that can last at least until next January, maybe there is reason for hope after all.
And if you are having trouble getting your shit together around breakfast time, you can do worse than starting the day with a past accomplishment on toast, a helpful reminder, alongside that cup of ambition, that whatever the day brings, you’ve accomplished something already.
*a note for the non-native English readers - because recent conversations have revealed this is not a given - marmalade in English always refers to citrus, and almost always Seville orange.
Baker’s dozen
13 good things from the past few months
I started the year as I meant to go on - forcing my sister to do a photoshoot of me in front of the three (3!) desserts I had prepared for New Year’s Eve while 17 people waited hungrily next door. Am I sharing this anecdote to have an excuse to share said photos on instagram now? Maybe.
Played padel for the first time. Loved it! Haven’t played again since. Such is life.
While on the subject of firsts, some friends came over on January 6th and we did galette des rois - I was the queen, having never done it before!
Was given irises (my favourite flowers!) by some friends when they came for dinner.
Went to see Shkoon at La Madeleine. An excellent time was had by all!
Made a Mallorcan gató de almendras - quite possibly my platonic ideal of cake. One day I will write more about gató.
Went pottery painting. It was harder (and probably more stressful!) than I expected, but I am thrilled by the result, which was inspired by, but obviously much scrappier than, these gorgeous designs.
Cooked an Indian feast for my friends. While I am endlessly cooking carbonara for my nearest and dearest, deviating from the usual script made it feel even more like a proper grown up dinner party and I loved every minute. Special mention goes to the mint and coriander chutney, and to the Forcado pasteis de nata that my fabulous friends brought for dessert.
Had a wonderful trip back to the UK that featured finally eating at St. John, a trip down memory lane with a day in Oxford, incredible roast pork and crackling by my sister’s boyfriend, and afternoon tea with Belgium’s best Spaniard.
Went on a spontaneous 18 km hike on a spare Saturday. Never underestimate the power of stomping through mud to clear the head.
Made an incredibly fortuitous improvised dinner that could not have gone better. I cannot be arsed to type up a whole recipe here (and some things are best left spontaneous), but basically roast parsnip, carrot, potato, onion with some oil and herbs, then add sausages and glaze with marmalade (what else) in the last few minutes.
Accidentally went on a Monday bender - the consequences were dire - but giggling with friends until the silly hours was good for the soul.
Have read so many good things already this year, and some favourites include Egg by Lizzie Stark, The Savage Detectives and Brighton Rock.