ISSUE 63, ALL THINGS GINGER, Part 3: Ginger Marmalade
Ginger Marmalade
The signature of marmalade is the conjunction of opposites: the sweet and the sour, the chunky and the smooth. It was a preparation that required an abundance of sugar, so began as an elite confection. Only when sugar became cheap at the beginning of the 19th century (1824 in the United States), did marmalade come into the foodways of common people. Apple marmalade, orange marmalade, and pear and ginger marmalade. This last item, manufactured in Great Britain, began appearing on confectionery shelves in Manhattan and Philadelphia in 1831. In the following year advertisements appear for a stand alone ginger marmalade.
Since the 1830s ginger marmalade was available on grocery shelves in the United States. In the 1950s and 1960s it came to the notice of newspaper culinary editors who began experimenting with recipes, such as ginger marmalade & bananas, the simply spooned jarred English or Scottish (Dundee’s or Robertson’s) marmalade into the pot into which another ingredient was being cooked. There were American imitations of British ginger marmalade on the market in the 20th century, such as Barclay Olde Country Style Jams, Jellies, Marmalades, sold by the Jordan Marsh Company of Boston.
The primary issue for Anglo-American consumers about ginger marmalade was the intensity of the ginger nuggets in the sugary matrix. They could be intense, fiery, or, if the strain of ginger tended to bitter as well as hot, astonishing. The “green ginger” available in the United States prior to 1980 could be quite vagrant in flavor, particularly if American grown. For this reason, marmalade recipes usually called in both the 19th and 20th centuries for an ancillary ingredient—apple, pear, or peach. Witness this formula from the 1946:
Note the lemons in this formula. The most significant development in the late 20th century processing of ginger marmalade was the marriage of lemon with ginger. Shreds of ginger root and slivers of lemon peel would be incorporated into the ginger marmalade to give a citrus sour as well as sweet, hot base supplied by the ginger root. In the 21st century a decided preference for the Meyer Lemon in this mixture emerged. You can see the end product in the lemony ginger marmalade depicted above from the SuwaneeRose.com company.