Meyer mania continues!
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We’re in the sweet spot of the Meyer lemon season and the tree outside my kitchen window is heavily hung with sunny golden fruit. The fragrant lemons will last for another month or so, but experience has taught me that gradually their thin peels will get coarse and puffy, so I’m trying to use as many as I can now.
As my colleague Amy Scattergood related recently, there’s almost no end to the possibilities of things you can do with a Meyer lemon. But somehow I keep coming back to the same thing: marmalade.
More a technique than a recipe, I came up with this Meyer lemon marmalade in 1995 after receiving a letter from Margaret Corbin describing how her mother had made the stuff. This is one of those recipes that won’t go away — every year I get several requests for it. It couldn’t be simpler: thinly slice the lemons, discarding the seeds; soak the lemons overnight in water to cover; add 2/3 cup of sugar for every cup of the lemon-water mixture; cook over high heat until the mixture jells.
Over the years, I’ve come up with a few refinements to the original recipe. First, I use more water now than I did then. My marmalade isn’t quite as intensely flavored, but the texture is much better. And as with all my jams and preserves, I cook the mixture in small batches of no more than 2 or 3 cups at a time. This cooks to a firm set more quickly, preserving color and fresh taste. Even better, working with such small batches, it’s much easier to tell when the jam has set — you can feel it change as you stir it.
The batch that’s on my counter now started with 2 pounds of lemons and 5 cups of water. That makes almost 8 cups of marmalade base, so I’ll add about 5 1/3 cups of sugar. And tomorrow afternoon, after I cook it, I’ll have about 6 half-pint jars of terrific marmalade. Supplemented by my annual batches of strawberry, nectarine and Elephant Heart Plum preserves, that should last me until about this time next year.
-- Russ Parsons
