Seville Orange season

Real English marmalade requires just three ingredients - bigarade oranges, sugar and water. That's correct, no vanilla pod! Bigarade oranges are usually called Seville oranges in the UK and oranges amères or bigarades in France, and they are available right now if you know where to look. The season is less than a month long but apparently they freeze well (I like seasonal stuff, in season!). They are normally untreated, never wax-coated and often come with leaves, bird droppings and so on. I'm told that supermarkets in both countries have them, but I've never found them in France and only at Morrisons in the St John Centre, Leeds (not the Kirkstall branch). My usual source, the organic greengrocers in Otley, closed not long before we left the UK. Fortunately our friend Susan told us that the fruit stall in Preuilly sur Claise market "opposite the fish stall" had them, but only in mid January. And indeed they did.

Tim likes coarse cut dark Oxford marmalade and I like fine cut Golden Shred, so I bought enough to make both.

Originally, marmalade was not made with oranges at all, but with quinces (marmelo in portuguese). The name has the same origin as the spanish membrillo, which means "quince". Dulce de membrillo is a thick delicious quince jam called marmelada in portuguese.  Seville oranges (citrus aurantium) are not the same species as sweet oranges (citrus sinensis). They are rather bulgy and ugly, with somewhat longer stalks than sweet oranges, and a texture to the skin of the sort you wouldn't like to see on your thighs. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall in a Guardian article of 29 January 2011 relates the story of how marmalade came to be.

Bigarade - full of Spanish sunshine

My recipe for Oxford Marmalade came from Hilaire Walden's Sensational Preserves, as you can see a well-used volume. One really nice thing about Sensational Preserves is, it has a number of recipes for yummy things to make with your preserves, such as Marmalade Gingerbread.

Ready to go!

Oxford Marmalade - for about 5 1-lb jars
Imperial measure:
1.5 pounds of Seville oranges
3 pints boiling water
3 pounds of sugar
Metric recipe (don't mix them!):
1 kilo of Seville oranges
2.5 litres of boiling water
2 kilos of sugar
Scrub the oranges and remove the stalks. Peel the oranges and cut them into chunky strips, pith and all (don't use a food processor). Put the peel into a large heatproof bowl. Chop up the flesh, extract the pips and put them into a small bowl. The flesh and juice goes in the big bowl. Pour half a pint of the boiling water onto the pips and the rest onto the peel and flesh. Cover both bowls and leave overnight.

In the morning you will find the pips coated in a transparent jelly. This is mainly pectin which is the agent that makes your marmalade set. You need this! So get as much of it off the pips as you can and into the bowl with the peel and flesh. Wash it through a non-metallic sieve, placed over the large bowl, dunking it up and down in the liquid as much as you can without spilling the pips. The best way to do this is with your fingers. Discard the pips.

Transfer the contents of the large bowl to a big saucepan with a lid, bring it to a boil then simmer it partially covered for 2-3 hours, stirring occasionally until the peel is really soft. The longer you cook it, the darker it will be after the sugar is added. You don't want the liquid to reduce by more than about half - top up if necessary.


Warm the sugar using the keep-warm setting of your oven if you have one (80 C). Add the sugar to the cooked fruit a bit at a time, stirring until it dissolves. Meanwhile, put the jamjars in the oven to sterilise and warm to jam temperature. Bring the jam to a rolling boil and cook for 10-15 minutes or until setting point is reached. I used a jam thermometer, but the quantity is rather small for one of these to be accurate, so I backed up by plopping a blob of liquid on a chilled plate. The blob wrinkled nicely when poked with a fingertip, so the marmalade was ready. If you pot it straight away all the peel floats to the top, so the trick is to let it stand for a quarter of an hour or so, then stir it gently. This will also disperse any froth that appears on the surface of the marmalade. Fill pots and cover. Leave overnight to set.

The finished article ready for labelling

Masculine, feminine or a bit of both?

We use a hydraulic log splitter to feed the ravenous maw of our chaudIère. I thought the French word for a logsplitter was a fendeuse for the machine and a fendeur for the (obviously male) user, by analogy with many other machine tools which are feminine - une tondeuse, une scieuse etc. By gum, I was wrong, judging by these specimens in the Bricomarché, both labelled "fendeur de bois".

An electrically powered fendeur de bois, at a burning-tenners price

Definitely un fendeur then.

Uh-oh, I was right after all....

Apprentice, workman, craftsman

Like most people in Touraine, we have ready access to fresh walnuts. Ours mostly end up in cakes, both sweet and savoury, though some growers have the patience to crack walnuts by hand in order to take the meats to a traditional huilerie such as Lepine, and return with their own freshly-pressed walnut oil. Because our nutcracker is still in a box somewhere, we had only a mole wrench to crack the walnuts - not a particularly successful tool! I remember as a child using a piece of pressed steel with a point that you inserted in the tiny slot in the base of the nut, and twisted, rather like opening an oyster. This tool was supposedly just the thing for walnuts, but I had no success with it!

When we saw James Gassiot's hand-turned wooden nut crackers, they had to be right - locally made (in le Grand Pressigny) from carefully selected pieces of timber with glorious patterning in the grain. Elm wood is strongly featured, along with yew and fruit woods. The casse-noix is in two parts - a bowl rather like a candle-holder for the shells, and a wooden hammer. The nut fits upright in a little cup and you smite it smartly with the hammer. If you catch it correctly, you chip pieces off both halves of the shell, and you can pull the entire nut meat out undamaged. You can crack hazel nuts in the same way. Bits of shell fly across the room, but it's much more fun than the mole wrench!

M Gassiot demonstrates the casse-noix. The book to his right is his autobiograpy.

A selection of nut crackers and mortars

M. Gassiot takes his portable lathe on its trailer to Marchés Gourmands so that he can create these utensils in front of your eyes. The pictures were taken at the Christmas Market at La Celle Guénand, where he set out his stall in one of the huge cellars of the castle.

Turning a "casse-noix"

On his retirement as compagnon charpentier in 2002, M. Gassiot wrote the story of his life's work as "Apprenti, Ouvrier, Artisan". The son of a master carpenter, he never considered another career, having, as he says, "fallen in at an early age", like Obelix in the magic potion. He started his training at the age of 14 at a wage of 6 Francs a month. A charpentier is a roofer and constructs the skeleton of large wooden buildings. The book is full of pictures of semi-clad buildings where he was involved in re-roofing (including the church in Le Grand Pressigny). There are also pictures of the more modern single-spanned buildings constructed using vast laminated beams. The earliest picture, taken in 1960, shows the proud newly-qualified 18-year-old James with his father and another master craftsman, holding a model roof, and standing in front of a lovely 2CV. Several of the later photos feature a white 2CV van! He started making the nut crackers in 2000, and his description in the book reveals the love that goes into them. Ever innovative, he is the inventor of a rolling seat on rails, made from an old garden chair and the wheels from some roller skates, for picking saffron...

Gormless in France

Until Christmas we were totally Gormless....
but....
at last the cellier is almost complete...
The underfloor heating is connected up [and working] so the final wall area could be completed with a worktop and the fridges underneath.

This is what the sides looked like before the view was obscured.

And...

now...

the Tower of Gorm* is finished!
We brought with us the IKEA wooden shelving from our cellar in Leeds.

The basic frame with the new rails.

Rant Warning... Rant Warning
The German family we sold the house to didn't want anything left behind!
And we mean ANYTHING!!
They even wanted us to clear out the kitchen units... BEFORE completion!?!
Oh yes?... we thought not!! What if the sale hadn't completed?
But... apparently that's the way it is done in Germany... you move lock, stock, barrel, hinges, doors, light fittings and the kitchen sink! But we think Peter was glad we didn't remove the sink... he ended up camping in the house for nine months to work on and oversee the conversion... which was difficult. He was trying to leave a lot of the original features we had kept.... but bring the house up to modern insulating standards... very difficult to leave ornate architrave and cornices and insulate the walls they are on!



So, along with everything else we brought the IKEA shelving.
And a wardrobe and a tallboy.... because the charity shops didn't want them!
But we are very glad we did... everything that is 'reasonably' priced in France seems to be made of MDF with a paper 'skin' that is printed to look like wood.
We like real wood... something solid [massif], preferably, or a good, thick, wood veneer if not, over plywood, good chipboard or thick MDF. Something that doesn't date too much as well.
But the shelving was intended to come with us... [I just felt like having a rant there! Tim]
Our excuse... it is a dull, grey morning after a rainy windy night...

Shelves in place- a few bottles there to test the important bit!

We have turned the shelving, from wall units, into an island to fill the empty middle of a large room.... and have created room for more shelves as a result.... not too difficult when you have the uprights to use as a drill guide.
The new shelves are solid, not bars, as we are using the 7€50 pine planks from the brico. This will be very useful for the beer and the small jar shelves as things tended to tip into the gaps 'twixt the bars before [and often created a domino effect].

Some of the "more room" replaces the metal shelving that had to go to the tip before we left... it was so rusty, weak and flimsy that we'd started to store empty bottles on it to lighten the loading. Empties will now be stored in the grange in those boxes that moved our preserves, wine and beers.
We only brought back a few bottles of wine that had been purchased over here... didn't quite get the purchase/consumption level correct there... shoulda bin zero!

These are some of the home-made shelves... these are spaced for small bottles.

Then we can start emptying the boxes full of conserves, pickles and instant ice-cream mixes [just add creme fraiche or yoghurt before using the machine]. The latter came around by accident... jams that just wouldn't set... but now stuff gets bottled deliberately at the halfway stage.... after a disaster with a dead freezer and the new one that was delivered.... dead! Another reason we are so keen on older methods of preserving... and part of the reason for choosing France, where, apart from the USA, everywhere seems to sell the equipment and chemicals you need. But we haven't found a source for sausage skins or saltpetre yet... anyone?

All shelves in, filling up fast...

* The actual IKEA furniture was called Sten... but this has now been replaced by Gorm.... same stuff, but the wood is cheaper and thinner and the finish isn't quite as good. We've got both here.
And the "Rise of the Island of Sten" just doesn't have the same ring to it!!
More Gorm will most likely be purchased to store 'stuff' [Pauline's term for things Tim has in boxes] if we can brave a trip to IKEA in Tours.

Pumpkin weather

It's a miserable day today with rain and blustery winds - a perfect day for staying indoors and doing indoor things. While Tim is putting up lights in our cellier, I am converting half a Crown Prince pumpkin into preserve. This year we grew three types of pumpkin / winter squash:

• Crown Prince - a variety originally from New Zealand and grown widely for its sweet, dense flesh. The name comes from the little warty ring like a crown around the flower end of the fruit. The skin is battleship grey and thin. The flesh is deep orange in colour and smells of apricots. Ours weigh in at up to four kilos and we got seven fruit from three plants, including two smaller ones. These keep in cool conditions until at least May of the following year. 

Crown Prince - before the knife goes in

• Butternut squash - two varieties of this, Harrier and Hunter, both grown for northern European conditions. Butternuts always produce a load of male flowers and take an age before any female flowers appear, but these varieties take off (sorry) a bit sooner than normal. We got a very good crop from both varieties - I've never seen either of them in France and Hunter actually came from the BBC's "Dig in" project. They look, taste and perform very much alike, producing a light-tan barrel-shaped or gourd-shaped squash that taste excellent and keep until at least March. We had to hand-pollinate to produce a decent crop - strip the petals off a male flower and dust the pollen into a female flower. Any kind of male squash flower will do for this, including courgette.

• Red Kuri or Uchiki Kuri or Red Onion Squash - a Japanese name for the French potimarron. Graines Baumaux reckon that Red Kuri is a superior strain of potimarron, and sells seeds both of the Japanese and French strains. This is a very pretty, tasty squash, onion shaped, deep orange when ripe and comes in a nice range of sizes, from a few hundred grammes to a kilo and a half. It is truly prolific and  produces fruit much earlier than the other two. The flesh is less dense than butternut or Crown Prince, of a rich chestnut flavour. They don't keep as well as the other two, but still store well into the winter.

Red onion squash or potimarron

Here's the recipe for Pumpkin Preserve - thanks to Virginia Sandon for this!

To each 4lb / 1800g pumpkin you will require:
     4lb / 1800g sugar
     ½ lb / 225g butter (unsalted)
     juice and zest of 6 lemons

Remove seed and peel from pumpkin and cut into dice approximately ½ inch / 1cm square. I find it easiest to quarter a hard pumpkin like Crown Prince, remove the seeds, cut it into 1cm slices vertically, peel the slices then dice them. Steam the diced pumpkin for half an hour or until soft enough to penetrate easily with the tip of a sharp knife. If using soft moist pumpkin, place the cooked pumpkin in a muslin bag and drain overnight (not necessary with Crown Prince or butternut). Weigh the cooked pumpkin and measure the other ingredients accordingly.

Put everything in a preserving pan and bring gently to the boil, stirring until the sugar is dissolved. Boil gently for 20 minutes or until thick, stirring occasionally to prevent sticking. The result should be a fairly thick spread; some little pieces of pumpkin may be expected. Put into warmed jars and seal.

This half yielded 3lb of cooked pumpkin

The yield from exactly 3lb of cooked Crown Prince was six Le Parfait "Home Made" 385ml jars. These jars are on special offer at Intermarché at the moment at €9.90 for twelve - that's a genuine bargain!

Potted up and cooling - then on with the labels.