The bittersweet truth about homemade marmalade

The spectrum of ‘bestowing homemade gifts on one’s friends’ ranges from giving to foisting. Pure giving is when you make something by hand especially for a particular person. Foisting is when you don’t let a friend leave your house before pressing a copy of your privately published memoir into their hands.

Where does homemade marmalade come on this spectrum? I think it comes nearer the benign ‘giving’ end than homemade jam, which is at the ‘foisting’ end, along with homemade sloe gin and nettle ale. It’s the difference between treasure-giving and glut-giving.

With marmalade, the driving force behind making the stuff is that you genuinely crave some, pouncing on the Sevilles as soon as they arrive in shops for their brief January window. That bittersweet taste of (in my case) Delia Smith’s Dark Chunky Seville Orange Marmalade, the recipe cut out from a 1993 Radio Times, has been deeply missed since last year’s batch ran out at the end of June, causing six months of privation during which I felt some annoyance at having given three whole jars of it away.

With jam, the driving force behind making it is that you have a tree buckling under the weight of old-fashioned fruit that can’t be eaten raw — damsons or quinces — and the only way to deal with the glut is to make it into vast amounts of jam. Having done that, what can you do next except give as much as possible away?

Has anyone ever made jam or marmalade without telling anyone about it? As well as being a private domestic act, it’s one of the most public things we do. We take photographs of the jars lined up. Those labelled jars say ‘I am the lucky kind of person who’s at liberty to set aside a whole Thursday in my kitchen with a preserving pan, butter muslin and cold saucers in the fridge’.