Marmalade

Marmalade’s had a rough old time of it lately. A recent report in the Telegraph declared it is dying out; that only oldies are buying it because millennials can’t handle ‘bits’ in spreads. Well, excuse me, but I direct you to this year’s World Marmalade Awards, held a few weeks ago in a big Georgian house called Dalemain just outside Penrith, which attracted nearly 2,000 homemade jars from around the globe. Big jars, little jars, jars decorated with glitter, sticky jars that had leaked in the post, jars with gingham hats. All laid out on trestle tables with individual, handwritten tasting notes from the WI judges underneath, marking each jar out of 20.

The two-day festival has been running for 12 years, launched by the matriarch of the house, Jane Hasell-McCosh, who grew up watching her grandmother make marmalade, standing on tiptoes to look into cauldrons of the stuff on the Aga. With foot and mouth disease having devastated this patch of Cumbria in 2001, Jane decided to revive the area. ‘It felt like the forgotten county, so I wanted to do something to help.’ All proceeds — £200,000 this year — go to local hospices.

Sophia Money-Coutts and Misti Traya extol the virtues of marmalade on the Spectator Podast:

She enlisted the support of the local WI to judge, along with Fortnum & Mason as a sponsor. In 2005, around 60 jars were sent in by enthusiastic locals. This year, the number was not only in the thousands; it also attracted a record number of foreign entries from more than 30 countries. The Japanese ambassador was there too, invited as guest of honour. In a speech to launch the proceedings, His Excellency Koji Tsuruoka said he was glad to see so many jars ‘made with love’.