Sour oranges are native to China. Trade routes brought
them to Africa and the Mediterranean in the 10th Century. Archaeologists suggest that the Bitter
Orange or Nerantzia was cultivated in Cyprus as early as 1394 AD. In Jennifer
Gay’s book, Greece: Garden of the Gods, I found out that narandj is from an
Arabic word meaning a fruit much loved by elephants!
Nerantzi, called kitromilo (or kitromilaki for the small ones) in
Cyprus, belong to the citrus family but they are not edible because of their
bitterness.
Today in Greece Narantzi trees are more often used as
decorative street trees and the ripe fruit left to rot or thrown away however, the small green fruit are
made into preserves. Housewives
make a spoon sweet with the small unripe, green fruit. (Many other fruits and
vegetables are also used to make glyko, whole fruit in syrup.
Nerantzi Glyko (Green Orange Spoon Sweet)
Ingredients:
- 50 small green oranges (walnut
size)
- 2 kilos of sugar
- 3 cups of water
The juice of 3 – 4 lemons (½lemon juice will be used in the end)
The process requires scooping out the inside of the small green oranges,
leaving this case in water and changing the water every day for five days, each
day cleaning the inside again. Then they are boiled briefly and each time put
back in cold water again for a few days until the skin is soft. Later repeating
the brief boiling adding lemon, and lastly adding sugar and boiling for fifteen
minutes, this last boiling with sugar is repeated until the liquid is syrupy.
And finally the fruit in syrup is bottled.
Seville Oranges
The
Spanish bitter orange is known as a Seville Orange and it is the one that most
people think of when making marmalade. It
was the cultivation of sour orange varieties in the Mediterranean that led to
the Seville Orange in the 12th Century. The Seville Orange was the main orange
variety in Europe for the next 500 years. It was also one of the first citrus
varieties brought to the New World where it was naturalized in the Caribbean,
South, Central and North America.
When sweet oranges were
introduced to America the sour orange trees began to shift role as an edible
fruit to a rootstock. However cross pollination of the sour and sweet orange
trees created bitter fruits in sweet orange varieties, which then forced
farmers to reduce production of sour orange trees.
Seville Oranges have a
thick, dimpled skin, and are prized for making marmalade. Being higher in
pectin than a sweet orange it gives a better set and a higher yield. It is also
used for orange-flavoured liqueurs. Once a year, oranges of this variety are
collected from trees in Seville and shipped to Britain be used in marmalade,
the fruit is rarely consumed in this manner locally in Spain.
On his Lambley Nursery blog David Glen gives his marmalade recipe and also tells some of the story of Seville Oranges.
He writes, ‘The fruit of
course is so bitter that it can’t be eaten fresh. It does however make the best
marmalade. Until the end of the eighteenth century marmalade was made from
quinces and was similar to modern quince paste. In 1797 Janet Keiller, who
owned a small shop in Dundee Scotland (she was incidentally one of Monty Don’s
forbears) was the first to use Seville oranges to make a preserve or jam. From
these small beginnings one of the great jam making business empires developed,
James Keiller and Sons.’
Alexandria, 1940
Takis has told me that he learnt to swim in this bay. He did not live far from the beach. This is what it looked like in the 1940s
Takis
mother made glyko, as Greeks are not familiar with jam or marmalade. However during the war years Takis was introduced to marmalade
via tins of marmalade that came from Australian for the allied forces in Egypt.
England, 1943
I was born during the Battle of Britain and in 1943 I was sent out of London, by train to the country, with many other children. At that time in England oranges and bananas were rare and exotic fruit. I well remember eating my
first ever banana and peach.
To keep the children healthy during those years
babies were given a spoonful a day of a sort of strong orange liquid, sweet and
tasty. I was jealous of my sibling getting this, I was only given cod liver
oil!
I believe my first taste of marmalade
came when visiting my Grandmother and I had some of her homemade variety. Even
later oranges were special. I remember them being individually wrapped in a tissue
with the name of the grower. When I was a little my friends and I made a
practice of collecting orange wrappers. Today you cannot see them, but some
folk have kept their collections. One Englishman has a collection with 2,797 different designs - collected by him and his
grandfather before him over more than 90 years - all meticulously stuck into
albums.
From the Internet.
‘It was never the custom to wrap more than a few oranges in each crate
to make an eye-catching display. But, with the rise of supermarkets, and thicker-skinned
oranges even this is now dying out. In more
recent times, citrus fruits - such as lemons, oranges, limes and grapefruit -
are protected by a thin coat of food-grade wax which prevents moisture loss and
mould growth and also minimizes bruising and enhances appearance.
Loving marmalade as he does Takis found
it hard to understand why, when the narantzia, which does so well and is often
grown, is not used in Greece to make marmalade in the same way as Seville Oranges.
However, having an old Nerantzi tree in our garden, and have planted another,
Takis has experimented and found he can make the best marmalade from Nerantzi
fruit. Takis (a person given to BIG projects) is now full of the idea of
developing this as a project. Who knows we may have a marmalade factory on our
property in Lemnos before long!
Takis has
been frustrated by the way his arthritis has made it hard to do heavy work, and
that the Greek house renovation project has just about finished. So this year
his marmalade business has been a perfect project for him and we now have about
30 bottles in Lemnos. And, just to keep his hand in, he bought some Seville oranges in Melbourne (as they have just arrived in the stores) and now we have another 30 or so in a cupboard in Emerald, enough, I think, to last us our lifetime. Though we also give bottles to various people to try.
Also, now that I’m a diabetic I have to restrict
my intake of sugar so Takis made me a batch with fructose that I can smear on.
Though my Sunday treat is a slice of white bread, loads of butter, and a slather of marmalade. Yummy!
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