Squeeze the day

Lift the spirits with a bowl of rosy-red blood oranges or a crate of Sevilles, ready for the preserving pan, says Jane Wheatley

IN her lovely book The Land Where Lemons Grow (2015), Helena Attlee watches Sicilian cooks making marmalade with both sweet and sour oranges, red grapefruit and clementines. She calls those British people who think only Sevilles will do ‘marmalade fundamentalists’. I admit to being one of them and I’m in good company: the late Alan Davidson, author of the magisterial The Oxford Companion To Food (1999), observed, ‘only bitter oranges can be used to make proper marmalade’. The nation’s loyalty to the Seville can be attributed to a storm at the beginning of the 18th century that drove a Spanish ship laden with Sevilles to take shelter in a Dundee harbour. As Mrs Attlee has recorded, a local grocer called James Keiller bought the cargo, only to discover the oranges were…

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Country Life (Digital) - 1 Issue, January 22, 2025

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