Sweet end

Marmalade is a fruit preserve made from the juice and peel of citrus fruits, boiled with sugar and water. The benchmark citrus fruit for marmalade production in Britain is the "Seville orange" from Spain, thus called because it was originally cultivated only in Seville, Spain; it is higher in pectin than sweet oranges and therefore gives a good set. The peel has a distinctive bitter taste which imparts to the marmalade. Marmalade can be made from lemons, limes, grapefruits, mandarins and sweet oranges or any combination.

In languages other than English, "marmalade" can mean preserves made with fruit other than citrus. For example, in Spanish the term usually refers to what in English is called jam (and "jalea" is similar to the English jelly).

Marmalade recipes include sliced or chopped fruit peel simmered in sugar, fruit juice and water until soft. Marmalade is sometimes described as jam containing fruit peel but manufacturers also produce peel-free marmalade.

The Romans learned from the Greeks that quinces slowly cooked with honey would "set" when cool. Greek μελίμηλον (melimēlon, "honey fruit") transformed into "marmelo"—for in Greek μῆλον (mēlon, "apple") stands for all globular fruits. A Roman cookbook attributed to Apicius gives a recipe for preserving whole quinces, stems and leaves attached, in a bath of honey. In 1524, Henry VIII received a "box of marmalade" from Mr. Hull of Exeter. As it was in a box, this was likely to have been marmelade, a quince paste from Portugal, still made and sold. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, "marmalade" appeared in English language in 1480, borrowed from French marmelade which, in turn, came from the Portuguese marmelada. The extension of "marmalade" in the English language to refer to citrus fruits was made in the 17th century, when citrus first began to be plentiful enough in England for the usage to become common.

There is also a legend about Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland very connected with the marmalade. She was ill and, as a result of his court spoke in French, they said “Marie est malade” (Mary is sick) while her doctor was giving her honey and oranges to treat her sickness. This sentence would become in “Marmalade”. However, there are no evidences that support this hypothesis.

Nowadays, marmalade only refers to the one made of oranges while the word used to call the others flavours is jam.

The Scottish city of Dundee has a long association with marmalade. In 1797, James Keiller and his mother Janet ran a small sweet and preserves shop in Dundee; they opened a factory to produce "Dundee Marmalade", a marmalade containing thick chunks of Seville orange rind, a business that eventually prospered. However, the first time the word marmalade appears in documents is around 1480, much time before Queen Mary, so the most probably thesis is that there was an important trade of Portuguese products to England around 1495.

As a conclusion, the marmalade seems to be another sauce or food but it has more than 500 hundred years… Amazing eh?