Scottish Penicillin by Paul Grant

 

https://bookswelove.net/grant-paul/

My name is Paul Grant and my first novel with BWL Publishing, Astraphobia, will be released in June of this year.  Please visit my BWL Author page by following this link to learn more about me and my novels: https://bookswelove.net/grant-paul/

Astraphobia follows three generations of a Scottish family who move first to Ottawa and then to Saskatchewan trying to outrun the curse of lightning.  I'm proud of my Scottish heritage, which includes a love of home-made marmalade or, as we call it, Scottish penicillin.

Marmalade is considered by some to be an aphrodisiac. Others think it enhances the effect of certain hallucinogenic drugs. 

Sherlock Holmes ate it with prawns, calling it brain food.  Of course most people prefer it spread on toast. And some, like D.H. Lawrence (and me), prefer to make their own. 

“I got the blues thinking of the future,” Lawrence said, “so I left off and made some marmalade. It’s amazing how it cheers one up to shred oranges and scrub the floor.”

The steam from the simmering citrus peel is a mid-winter tonic, and the final product will keep scurvy at bay.  March 10 is National Marmalade Day, marking the Sunday in 1495 when the first shipment of marmalade arrived in Britain from Portugal. That batch was made from quince, a hard and bitter pear-shaped fruit that’s almost inedible raw. But for centuries, people including the Romans, Greeks, 

French and Portuguese have made a sort of jam by slowly simmering quince with honey. In Greece the result is melimelon. The Portuguese call it marmalada, and still consider quince (marmelo) the only fruit worth using. But for millions around the world, marmalade means thick chunks of Seville orange peel suspended in jelly like burnished gold. 

Whatever its origins, marmalade is often associated with Scotland, thanks partly to a Dundee grocer called James Keiller and his canny wife Janet.

In 1777 a storm stranded a Spanish ship in Dundee Harbour. Keiller got a good deal on the ship’s cargo of Seville oranges.  But when he took delivery, he found the skin of the oranges to be thick and coarse, and the pulp sour, stringy and inedible. Janet had the idea to make a jam from the peel – like quince marmalada. More than two centuries later, Keiller & Sons still ship Dundee thick-cut Seville orange marmalade to half the world.

There are many other international and local purveyors of marmalade now, of course.  You can get ginger marmalade, three-fruit marmalade, even marmalade made with Scotch, which I think does a disservice to both. I prefer my marmalade straight up –oranges, water, sugar and pectin. Seville oranges are the best, but navel oranges are quite acceptable. Even the venerable marmalade-makers at Tiptree admit that using simply oranges and sugar makes it “...more time consuming and more difficult to make a consistent product, but it is still the best way and done properly, gives the very best results.”

Marmalade keeps well, and improves with age. At least, I’ve heard it does. Mine rarely lasts long enough.  Email me and I’ll send you my father’s recipe: homerink9@gmail.com  

                                                                    Marmalade in the morning has the same effect 

                                                                    on taste buds that a cold shower has on the body.
                                                                                Jeanine Larmoth - Harper’s Bazaar