Author’s Note: “On Making Marmalade” is an excerpt from my lyrical essay collection, The Blue Years. I wrote it as a love letter, or meditation, on taking our time to do things right. I had never made marmalade before, and something about the process was so beautiful to me. How do we show our love? How do we spend our precious time? How can one translate into the other? There is something incredibly honest and simple about this piece, and in the entirety of the collection, it is something a little different. A moment of sweetness.
On Making Marmalade
IF YOU WANT TO SHOW SOMEONE how much you love them, make them marmalade.
This year has only just begun, and I can already tell you one of the lessons it carries with it: anything worth doing well takes time, and anything you do is worth doing well with patience and grace and a steady hand.
If you’re going to make marmalade, it’s going to take you an entire day. You’re going to go to the farmers’ market early when they open so you can have your pick of the very ripe oranges from the bargain bucket.
Oranges, to me, feel so very California, a staple of my understanding of this place. They grow so frequently that sometimes you will see a tree weighed down by unpicked fruit, so swollen it falls to the ground and rots. So much excess and so beautiful at once. Next to my sister’s house, there is an orange tree. I can see it out the kitchen window when I wash her dishes, and it reminds me of the few weeks I lived with her when I was very sad.
When you get home from the market, you will make tea and wash the oranges in a large metal pot that you fill with water and vinegar. Let the oranges sit for a little while, then scrub them clean because you use the entire orange. Something about this act will feel holy—the scrubbing, most likely.
The oranges will glow, and you will wonder which came first, the name of the color or the fruit. You have a vague memory of wondering this before and asking a friend over drinks in a dark bar. And they knew the answer, but now it escapes you—the answer, not the memory of the drinks.
Not everyone likes marmalade. It’s a specific taste, a balance of the bitter and the sweet. Because you use the rind, you have to peel the oranges, save the rind, and then slice it into impossibly thin ribbons. About halfway through this process, you’ll wish you had decided to do something else with your day. This can be made much simpler if you have a mandolin, in which case use that.
You’ll spend the rest of the day cooking, watching, forgetting, floating around the house while you half do other things, but always still making marmalade. You cook the oranges and sliced rinds with a few cups of water. Cook them long enough so everything starts to wilt. This will take hours upon hours. The steam will be laced with citrus and tangle in your curls and make the house smell sweet and sticky. You fold laundry, and water plants, and let the dog out, and make more tea.
Once the oranges are cooked, you add sugar. More sugar than you’d think—pounds of sugar. You stir carefully as it spits and tries to burn you. This time you have to be more attentive; you have to wait and stir and let it boil but never burn. If it burns, it’s all ruined. And then you stir some more. Eventually it thickens and cooks down, and you cross some kind of invisible threshold where everything you had starts to look like everything you want: the transference of effort into something entirely new. By this time it’s late afternoon, and the sun in the house is different, and you have to put on a sweater, and the tea you made and then forgot about has gone cold.
There are so many other things you are supposed to be doing today. So many things that need the same kind of tending to, the same care and attention, the same patience. But perhaps an act in one is an act in all. Perhaps some of it carries over like the sweet smell of the marmalade, perhaps not. Perhaps it’s nothing at all.
You set the marmalade out on the counter to cool and thicken, and once it has you spoon it into jars that you’ve saved from store-bought sauerkraut and honey. You take some to your sister and some to your mother and store some in the fridge. And when he comes home, you feed him a spoonful. He kisses you with the bitter and the sweet on his lips, and he tells you it’s delicious. Everything feels good and simple, and you remember that this too took time.
If you want to show someone how much you love them, make them marmalade.
♦
Erin Rose Belair received an MFA in fiction in 2013 from Boise State University. Her story “Rare Items From The Universe” won Glimmer Trains’ Emerging Writers Award. Her other work appears in Narrative, Southern Indiana Review, Greensboro Review, and more. She was a Vermont Center Fellow in 2018 and is currently writing her first novel. Website: erinrosebelair.com
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