Bitter marmalade, lemony shortbread
Because it's citrus season and I'm having a *mild* existential crisis
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I’m doing something that I’m very bad at. I am listening to music and trying to write. Usually, if I’m going to say anything vaguely intelligible, I need silence, white noise or the indistinct chatter of people in distant rooms. Instead, Doja Cat is singing about killing her ex and his girlfriend and going to farmers markets (why??), and getting these words out is about ten times harder than usual.
But that’s the point.
They say that after the age of 30, people tend to ossify. Like jelly slowly setting, the new things we try grow fewer and more rare, our tastes become inflexible, our opinions ever more firmly held. A truly depressing fact I heard (I think it was on a Freakonomics podcast) was that if you haven’t tried sushi before you’re 30, you’re probably not going to. SUSHI!! If you haven’t embraced thrash metal or discovered a proclivity for minimal techno before your fourth decade starts, you’re probably not going to start liking those things either (this particular phenomenon has been dubbed ‘musical paralysis’, it strikes, on average, at 30.5 years of age and is the reason I play We Like to Party by the Venga Boys more often than I care to admit).
If these depressing facts are actually true, it means the sum total of our likes and dislikes, the preferences, passions and perversions that we carry around with us through the entirety of our lives are no more than the tinny, reverberating echoes of experiences we had between the ages of 0 and 29.
No new foods, no new fashions, the same old restaurants and reunion tours from bands hocking the same old songs from decades ago.
And look, maybe the birth of our first child has thrown me into an existential crisis about my own mortality and my inevitable decline into decrepitude, but let’s put that possibility off to the side for now. Because apparently Rolling Stone has collated The Best Songs of 2023 So Far and for better or worse I am going to play them all as my own personal act of defiance against the mundane ravages of time, while I tell you about the other new thing I’ve done this winter.
I learned how to make marmalade!
Have you made marmalade before? Was it murky? First time I made marmalade it was cloudy and murky. It tasted fine - it tasted good, actually. But it didn’t have that beautiful, clear and syrupy, sunset-orange look that I can only assume Doja Cat is after when she goes shopping for marmalades and jams at her local farmers market.
(Drake’s singing now, something about wanting to be taken out of the group chat).
Anyway, there was SO MUCH citrus around this winter I had the chance to experiment, and I’ve solved it! And it’s easy!
After some thorough experimentation, I learned that:
For clear marmalade, you need to use only the skin of the citrus - no flesh, and boil it fast and hot
Using the citrus juice as well as the peel makes for a much more intensely flavoured marmalade (lots of recipes just use the peel and water - bleugh! what a wasted opportunity!)
You don’t need to stir it much until towards the end as it thickens (just to make sure it’s not sticking to the bottom of the pan), and
Lemons, which contain the most pectin of all the citrus fruits, should be added to any citrus marmalade to help it set (you don’t need fancy ‘jam makers sugar’ with added pectin, the lemons will get you there just fine)
I also had a really acute craving for lemony shortbread yesterday, so I made that too. Then I ate my lemony shortbread, drizzled with bitter orange marmalade and sprinkled with rosemary blossoms, and I felt young, and free, and zesty and alive.
If you, too, would like to feel young, free, zesty and alive, it’s easy. Make marmalade. Make shortbread. Put on the shoes you never wear, play a song you’ve never heard and flip Old Man Time the bird (recipe below).
