Marmalade Cheat

Once upon a time long, long ago we had toast for breakfast each morning, made with store bought bread. I had honey on mine, Bill ate his with margarine spread and marmalade. 

• Before we had a bread making machine and Bill always had marmalade on his toast; 
• Before we gave up toast for cereal (except at weekends);
• Before we put aside spreads for real butter;
• Before the pandemic when we ran low on butter and Bill decided to try his toast with just jam and pronounced it fine. 

But not before I had started experimenting with making jam.

Dead easy to mix the jam in with the Seville oranges.

When shopping for food I'm inclined to choose the cheapest brand first and if that disappoints to then work my way up until the quality is sufficient. I discovered that Bill didn't care for the cheapest marmalade, it was too sweet, so I bought him the special low-sugar brand at 3-4 times the price. Then I discovered Lakeland carried tins of Seville oranges and found that combining a jar of cheap sugary marmalade with a tin of Seville oranges made several jars of just-right marmalade at just under the price of the special brand. This was probably my first foray into jam making. Supermarkets also began carrying tins of Seville oranges.

I don't know about your cupboards now but mine are being whittled down to the out-of-date, I'll-figure-out-what-to-do-with-that-later stuff. Amongst which was two said tins of Seville oranges and a single jar of sugary marmalade. Since the tins have shrunk since the olden days I thought I'd risk it.

I didn't taste it until the whole process was nearly finished as I hate marmalade, with or without sugar. I worried that it might be too bitter but Bill pronounced it as perfect, which was a relief. I got four and a half jars from this, which will mean the jam I like will last longer since Bill will go for the marmalade first as he always did when we had store bought jam. At least that's the plan.

I did express some concern that the low sugar content might allow the jars of this mix to spoil, but Bill seemed confident that since the dimples in the lids had all popped, it would be fine. Hopefully any spoilage will be obvious with green or white growth on the top. This would of course mean that we had four less jars of marmalade. And I wouldn't care a whit.