Tag: Marmalade

We’ve just had a typically British weekend.

Rain.

And lots of marmalade.

Surely it’s only in England that you would find an annual festival dedicated to marmalade in all its forms?  And it’s no surprise to find it hosted in a delightful country house, Dalemain, the family home of the Hasell-McCosh family.

Eleven years ago, Jane Hasell-McCosh devised this very British festival, and now in March every year, some 2,000 marmalade makers submit their entries to be judged .

The day kicked off in a rare rain-free moment with local schoolchildren belting out a jolly song about the delights of marmalade.  In this ballad, they rejected any treat they were offered, preferring instead a slice of toast, well slathered with this bitter orange preserve.  As if.

Marmalade celebrated in song.

Dan Lepard and Jane Hassel-McCosh start the day off.

The judges of 2000 pots of marmalade get their reward.

MC was one of my baking heroes, Dan Lepard.  He introduced everyone, and announced the winners.  And then we went into the house, to visit room after room stuffed with pots of marmalade.  Each jar is awarded a series of marks, and is given an individual critical commentary.  I was quite cross that I hadn’t in the end made the effort to enter any of my own efforts.

The entrants though are not only true Brits, eccentric or otherwise.  In our B&B we had met Chris Brown, a baker from Vancouver, who had come for this one weekend only to enter his marmalade.  He’d already won gold medals in previous years.  So many Japanese have done well that the Japanese Ambassador himself came to the opening ceremony and made a gracious and witty speech.  There were Australians there, and Kiwis, South Africans, Americans, someone from the Czech Republic ….

The competition has categories for Seville orange marmalade of course, for marmalade with a twist, for any citrus marmalade, for dark and chunky marmalade ….. all this could be predicted.  But a category for marmalade makers who are also campanologists?  Octogenarians?  ‘The Establishment’: those redoubtable and upstanding members of society, such as bishops, MPs and judges who used to be the only people who could verify your likeness for a passport application?

This is entirely in keeping with the professional-but-with-a strong-hint-of-the-amateur feel of the festival.

Dan Lepard and Jane Hassel-McCosh open the proceedings.

I paid extra to go to Question Time.  Baker Dan Lepard, food historian Ivan Day, marmalade guru Pam ‘the jam’ Corbin, and  Martin Grant,  MD of Mackay’s Marmalade made the hour whizz past.  One conversation stood in my mind. ‘If we sent each of you home with a basket of raspberries, or blackcurrants and asked you to make jam, you’d all come back with much the same product.  If we sent you home with a bag of oranges, you’d each come back with something quite different.’ And it’s true.  They’d range from dense, dark and treacly with big chunky chewy peel to bright jewelled orange jellies with a delicate filigree of fine strands of zest suspended within.  And all stops in between.  This immense variety to be had from a product made simply with oranges, a bag of sugar, a lemon, and perhaps a little secret something is what gives marmalade its continuing appeal.

After lunch, we popped into Penrith.  The town had gone orange for the weekend.  The face of the town clock was orange: the shop windows were dressed in orange, and there was an orange-themed market in the town square.  Marmalade anyone?  It was all good fun, despite the unremitting rain.

The town clock turns orange for the weekend

Stall on the market square

Next morning, we headed home.  The rain was so intense that newly established rivers and waterfalls cascaded from the hills.  Older-established rivers burst their banks and flooded across roads.  Fields developed impromptu lakes.  It reminded us of a remark that Malcolm had overheard at the festival: ‘I come every year.  But it always rains’

Of course.  This is Britain.  This is Cumbria.

But this was our welcome home to Yorkshire.