Marmalade

Thursday

Sophia Money-Coutts

The secret to a great service station

A couple of months ago, an invitation arrived. Would I like a room at the Savoy for the Baftas? I could attend the awards, guzzle champagne, walk the red carpet alongside Demi Moore and Ariana Grande and so on. Sadly, I replied, I was already booked up that weekend as a judge for a very different kind of competition: the World Marmalade Awards in Cumbria. This year marks the 20th anniversary of this event, held at a whopping Grade-I listed house just outside Penrith, surrounded by stone walls and sheep. Ahead of time, all judges were told to bring warm clothes, so I drove from London with a suitcase of jerseys. Upon arrival, I was shown to a room with a four-poster bed (given to the family by Queen Anne) but no heating. There didn’t seem to be central heating at all, in fact.

Tuesday

Olivia Potts

You are what you don’t eat

If asked to think about food preservation for a moment you might picture an aproned woman boiling oranges for marmalade in a large copper maslin pan; or vegetable scraps being turned into stock; or those recipes from wartime rationing using root veg in place of sugar; or even, with an eye to the modern, you might imagine a trendy chef preparing offal in a gleaming chrome kitchen to ensure the nose-to-tail credentials of his restaurant. Some of the attempts in the past to spin out the life of fresh produce sound positively disgusting But there is more to the history of preservation than preserves, and the obvious enemy, when we talk about preservation, is waste – the two engaged in a constant battle.

Wednesday

Ameer Kotecha

A diplomatic sweetener: the power of marmalade

It took Paddington Bear to solve the age-old mystery of what the Queen keeps in her handbag. When Her Majesty pulled out a marmalade sandwich during the pair’s sketch at the Platinum Jubilee concert this summer, it did more than just tickle the audience. It also served to remind us of our national love affair with marmalade. Long before Paddington developed a taste for it, the preserve had been a stalwart of British popular culture, from Jane Austen (where Lady Middleton applies marmalade as balm for her daughter’s scratch) to Evelyn Waugh (where, in Brideshead Revisited, Charles Ryder eats ‘scrambled eggs and bitter marmalade with the zest which in youth follows a restless night’) – not to mention Samuel Pepys, Agatha Christie and Ian Fleming.