Take One Ingredient: Seville Orange

The Seville (or Bitter) Orange is a strange fruit.  Too sour to eat as one would usually with an orange, its perfume allows it to be used in cooking to make some quite exceptional dishes.  The Seville Orange is used as the grafting stock for a great many orange trees, forming the base tree on which the more familiar sweet oranges grow.

The Seville orange has a very short season - from late December through to early February - meaning we don't get much of a chance to use it.  This inevitably means long evenings in front of the hob on dark winter nights, stirring a great cauldron of boiling marmalade.  It makes the best marmalade - the essential oils found in the skin provide that deep slightly bitter taste that makes marmalade more than just 'orange jam', and the great many pips in the fruit provide much of the natural pectin required to make the marmalade set.

This year, however, I have been determined to do more with the Seville Orange than just make marmalade.  So far, I've made a good orange mayonnaise to have with fried fish, a less succesful orange-butter sauce with baked fish and some really lovely orange and marmalade cakes - recipes to follow.  And, of course, I spent the best part of a day making great quantities of marmalade...

links: digg this    del.icio.us    technorati    reddit