Making marmalade

Some of my other posts have dealt with seasonal food topics, such as wild garlic, elderflowers and game. Well, January and the beginning of February is the time when Seville or marmalade oranges are in season – only for about five weeks.

The word “marmalade” originally referred to quince preserve. In fact, the association of the word with citrus preserves is a more recent English phenomenon and is not linguistically correct in many other European languages. The popular myth is that James Keillor of Dundee invented marmalade in 1797 when he was confronted with an unwanted cargo of Seville oranges. However, there are recorded instances of Seville oranges being referred to as marmalade oranges before that. Nevertheless, Dundee is associated with marmalade (and almond-topped fruit cake) in British culture.

Seville oranges are almost impossible to get in either in Switzerland – where I now live – or in Brussels, where I used to live. Even in Britain it can be hit and miss finding them during the short season, since few people are bothered making marmalade from scratch any more (you can buy tinned kits which are a lot less work and the result taste fine; it’s just that I like chunky peel in my marmalade and even the kits that are labelled “coarse cut” aren’t nearly chunky enough for me).  

For the first time since I last left Ireland in 2008, I was in London at exactly the right time last weekend and I spent all of Saturday looking for a market that would sell Seville oranges, without success. Then, having given up, I was on my way to the cinema with my son and daughter when we stopped at a supermarket for goodies and there my son found them.  I bought two kilos, which I brought home to Switzerland the next day.

On Monday evening, when I got home from a long day at work, I started to make the marmalade. I follow Delia Smith’s basic recipe (http://www.deliaonline.com/recipes/cuisine/european/english/traditional-seville-orange-marmalade.html) but it was a few years since I had last made a batch and I realised early on that I was breaking a few rules. First of all, I was working with double the quantity that she recommended as being the most you could make at once if you wanted it to set properly. I’d multiplied it by 1.5 before without coming to harm but doubling? Of course, I could have split the oranges and frozen half but I wanted to get all the messiness over and done with (you’ll see why). More importantly, I realised that I’d forgotten to buy lemons; ideally I should have had two (you use the juice and seeds but not the peel) so I didn’t know if that would also affect the likelihood of the mixture setting.

Anyway, I proceeded with juicing the oranges, my chapped fingers getting raw from the sharp juice, and then chopping the peel. That took about an hour and a half. I saved all the seeds and extraneous pith in a muslin bag. Then I had to put the juice and peel into a saucepan with 4 litres of water (a little less that Delia specified but I was afraid that using the full amount would be another complication when it came to setting point). I tied the muslin bag to the handle of the pot so that it was suspended in the liquid (the seeds and pith are the main source of pectin that allows the marmalade to set) and cooked the peel for about 2 hours. By then it was time for bed (after I had cleaned all the kitchen surfaces, which were sticky with orange juice).

The first thing to do on Tuesday evening was to squeeze any residual pectin out of the muslin bag. You get this sticky orange goo that you have to scrape off the bag (and your hands) with a spoon. Messy! Then I had to warm the sugar a little in the oven (4 kilos of it) and put it into the pot.

Now the decision to double the quantities came back to haunt me. The liquid was too near the rim of the pot for my liking and I had visions of it boiling over and making an unholy mess. So I transferred it to a pot that was twice the size. However, I couldn’t get it to a fast boil, after an hour of trying, so I had to transfer it back. By then it had concentrated a bit but I had to watch it when it came to a fast boil as it started splattering everywhere. Still, after the prescribed 15 minutes of fast boil, when I tested it on a saucer that I’d put in the freezer, it had set. It was time then to stir in a knob of butter to clarify the mixture, put the jars in the oven to warm, and wait 15 minutes for the peel to settle.

I’ve never succeeded in getting jam or marmalade into jars without making a mess. It goes everywhere. It was on my face, the seat of my trousers, the cooker, the worktop, the floor, the tiling. I’m sure I’ll still find some more tonight, even though I tried to clean up.

However, I now have 11 pots of delicious chunky marmalade. It’s a little sweeter than my usual effort, probably thanks to the absence of lemon and the concentration of the liquid. But it has set beautifully.

One of the reasons why it’s so important to have good marmalade is in order to be able to follow another Delia Smith recipe: marmalade bread and butter pudding. It’s divine – and very easy.

http://www.deliaonline.com/recipes/cuisine/european/english/chunky-marmalade-bread-and-butter-pudding.html

A sickeningly low point

There were many good reasons why the British Army wasn't popular in working class Catholic districts of Belfast in 1972. Nevertheless, the impulse to go to the aid of a wounded soldier was a natural and humane one. It was an impulse, however, that had tragic consequences for one Belfast family.


Jean McConville was a protestant from East Belfast (Belfast was - and still is - largely divided along religious lines between the protestant East and the Catholic West). When she married Arthur McConville, a Catholic, she herself converted to Catholicism. That didn't save the couple from persecution by both communities and the family had to move on a number of occasions, ending up on the Falls Road, West Belfast. By the time Arthur died of cancer in 1971, the family had 10 children.


It was only a few months later that Jean was allegedly seen going to the aid of a wounded soldier. That led to her being beaten up in a bingo hall. The following day a gang of masked men and women burst through the front door of the house. Years later, her son, Archie, who was 16 at the time, recalled how they told his mother to put on her coat and took her away. They waited all night for her return - and the next night too. Helen, who was 15, tried to look after the younger siblings, including 6-year-old twin brothers. After three weeks of waiting, and by now hungry as well as frightened, they were visited by a stranger who gave them their mother's purse, with 52 pence inside it, and her three rings. Two months after the abduction, the children were spit up by social services.


I recall seeing some of the McConville children on television when they were grown up and it was clear that the trauma would mark them for life. Again and again they were told that their mother had deserted them. The RUC (the then Northern Irish Police Force) were twice notified of her disappearance. But the RUC was overwhelmingly Protestant and deeply sectarian and they refused to investigate, choosing instead to believe an anonymous tip-off that she had absconded with a soldier.


It was nearly 30 years later, when the peace process in Northern Ireland was finally gaining traction, that I saw those McConville children on television. The occasion was the choreographed handing over of information from the IRA, which was now in ceasefire mode, to the Irish authorities. This led to the digging up of a car park on the County Louth coast (just south of the border) and the children were hoping that their mother's body would finally be found. By then the IRA had finally admitted her murder, alleging that she was an informer. In the event, her body was not found and the agony dragged on until 2003, when a storm washed away part of the embankment on Shelling Beach car park and exposed her body.


We now know that she had been brutally interrogated after her abduction. She had been beaten with such force that many of her bones were cracked and her hands were mutilated. the cause of death was a single shot to the back of the head. 


The British establishment acted with a generosity that was tragically rare in the history of the Northern Ireland conflict. Instead of hiding behind their "neither confirm nor deny" approach, the Lord Chief Justice ruled that there should be an investigation. in 2006, the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland, Nuala O'Loan, confirmed that Jean McConville was never an informer; simply the innocent victim of abduction and murder.


In the past, when Sinn Fein (the IRA's political wing) used to talk about "the politics of condemnation" I understood what they meant. Many politicians and commentators chose to emphasise IRA atrocities in order to downplay loyalist terrist atrocities (which were often even more sectarian) or the dirty deeds at times of the British and Northern Irish authorities. But the IRA (who never hesitated to do the reverse themselves) gave them plenty of pretexts for this behaviour. Whether it was bombing shop-goers in Belfast, innocent people enjoying a night out in Birmingham, Guildford and Woolwich, more innocent people attending a WWI memorial service at Enniskillen, two children shopping in Warrington or any of the other foul murders they carried out, they rarely failed to "top" an atrocity by following it with something even worse. Even by these grisly standards, Jean McConville's abduction and murder is particularly sickening.


No-one has ever been charged with Jean McConville's murder but circumstantial evidence is emerging that Gerry Adams, the man who subsequently led Sinn Fein into the Peace Process, is implicated. Most people don't want to know. They prefer that there is peace than that there is justice. They respect the fact that Gerry Adams took personal and political risks when, two decades later, he chose peace over continuing war.


I can understand that view. But sometimes I just have to hold my stomach. And I can perfectly understand why the McConville children don't buy into it.


Finally, it seems sad to me that very few articles about this case include Jean McConville's picture. I think we should see it from time to time - to be reminded that there was a real human being behind this tragedy. So here she is, with three of her children. I hope that the Guardian and the McConville family forgive me.

Where is Ireland going?

During the summer I wrote about a shopping trip down Grafton Street where I sensed that the gloom that has descended in Ireland since 2008 was showing signs of lifting just a little. Sadly I was mistaken. More businesses are failing, more people are going out of work and more people are emigrating.

When I was in Poland at Christmas a friend queried as to whether or not it was Ireland's generous (as he saw it) social welfare provisions were what dragged Ireland down. Well, of course it wasn't. I can understand why a Pole would think that; Poland is a poor country that exported a lot of cheap labour to Ireland during the boom. Nor was it public sector pay, as such. Comparisons between average pay rates in Ireland and elsewhere are misleading unless they are put in the context of the overall cost of living, including the cost of accommodation (more on that in a minute). Of course, there were some heavily protected professions within the public sector and the higher levels (including Government Ministers) were overpaid. Moreover, we get bad value for money from our civil service but this is because of structural inefficiency more than anything else; it doesn't mean that there aren't lots of civil servants who aren't struggling at present. And fixing this isn't nearly as visible or sexy as just blindly cutting numbers and jobs.

It is also worth noting that, even at the height of the boom, our spending on many aspects of social policy was way down the EU league, behind even some of the former Communist countries.

No, the cause of our woes is simply the fact that for a decade the Government maintained a clientelist relationship with the building sector and ran the country for their benefit. Tax policies were pursued to favour building of houses and hotels that weren't needed; reckless lending to property developers allowed them to pay over the odds for land and the prices they charged for housing could only be maintained by reckless lending to buyers. I wasn't aware until recently that new mortgagees were even given a cheque book that they could use to buy furniture and white goods, the value of which would then be added to the mortgage sum; some used it even for buying groceries. The banks lent money far beyond their capacity but they were able to do this because of cheap credit in the Eurozone, chiefly from Germany.

Normally, it takes too parties to create a bad debt situation. Of course, the borrower is responsible in the first instance. However, business routinely involves extension of credit in some shape or form and there is, inevitably, some onus on the lender not to recklessly lend to those who are unlikely to pay back - or else face the consequences.

It is this "facing of the consequences" which is lacking in Germany's response to the crisis. The latter country persists in the belief that it can squeeze back the money its banks recklessly lent by forcing the Governments of Ireland and other countries to carry the losses of those banks. Angela Merkel is making much of the fact that, under the arrangements agreed by all but the UK last December, in future countries that break the Eurozone's fiscal rules can be taken to the European Court. The best indication of how badly that mediocre and lacklustre technocrat is missing the point is that, prior to 2008, Germany broke those rules more often than Ireland did. Ireland appeared to comply with them because the exchequer was buoyed up by money from property buyers; money that was ultimately borrowed from private German banks via Irish banks. There is nothing in the new "treaty" (if it ever materialises) to stop this from happening again. (This is not to mention the fact that there is no point in pursuing bankrupt Member States in the European Court for fines they can't pay).

There has been a change of Government in Ireland in the meantime but no evidence that the new Government is showing any new thinking; quite the contrary. They are still trying to balance the hole in the balance sheets by spending cuts that squeeze the most vulnerable sectors of society, such as special needs children.

It might well be argued that any option in the current situation will hurt vulnerable people. I have some sympathy with this view and I am wary of calls from the left for walking away from the banks entirely. There is a lot of focus on bondholders in this regard but ultimately, if Ireland walks away from the banking mess deposit holders will lose money too and that will hurt a lot of poor people and charitable institutions. So yes, I accept that there are no options that are consequence-free.

What makes the current situation harder to stomach is the fact that the new Government is applying one rule for special needs children and another for its own coterie of party hacks and donors. The former are being given jobs at pay rates that breach the Government's own ceilings and the latter are getting sinecure appointments to the boards of State institutions. There is a lot of talk of austerity from Government circles but it is all couched in terms that make it clear that there is an inner circle with a divine right to be insulated from such austerity.

In the meantime, there are families that can't even feed themselves...

The king of Europe's forests

A few months ago I wrote about Donana National Park in Spain after a visit there in September. Last week I had the privilege to visit another of Europe's great national parks, almost at the other end of the continent. I'm talking about Białowieża (byah-wo-vyeh-zhah) National Park (Białowieski Park Narodowy) in Poland.


The forest of Białowieża once extended over hundreds of square kilometres. In the 15th century, it bacame the private hunting ground of Polish monarchs, largely due to the presence of a herd of Europes' largest land mammal, the European bison (or wisent - zubr in Polish). After the partition of Poland the Tsars were the beneficiaries and some quaint 19th century lodges and other buildings still bear witness to this.

Sadly, the First World War changed much of that, with the occupying Germans carrying out logging on an unprecedented scale and wiping out the bison in order to feed their troops.

Intially, the new independent Poland, struggling economically, sought to maximise the short-term gain to be made from continued logging but soon came to the realisation that this was unsustainable (it had to pay compensation when it reneged on a contract to supply timber to the international market). Captive bison from zoos abroad (that had originally been given as gifts by the Government) were reintroduced to the forest in 1929 (today there are over 800 but the limited gene pool means that they remain vulnerable). It was subsequently declared a national park in 1932.

Today, the forest extends over 1,200 sqare kilometres, split more or less evenly between post World-War II Poland and Belarus. The Polish National Park has a total area of 105 square kilometres, of which 47 square kilometres is strictly protected; i.e.it can only be visited with a guide, logging is prohibited, the bison are not fed and dead wood is left to rot naturally, making a huge contribution to the variety of insects and fungi found in the forest. 

As well as the bison, there are lynx, wolves, polecats, beech martens, pine martens and several other carnivores, as well as wild boar, deer, squirrels, shrews, moles and numerous other mammals. There are eight species of woodpecker, including the rare white-backed woodpecker. The dominant trees are pedunculate oak, lime, Scots pine, Norway spruce and ash, but maple, black alder, wych elm, hornbeam, mountain ash, willow, birch, aspen, yew and silver fir are also found.

It was unseasonably warm and dry when we were there on 27 December: me, Magdalena, and our friends Joanna and Nico, as well as Arek, our excellent guide. Temperatures were above zero and, against all our expectations, there was no snow. We did not see bison but we were compensated for this by seeing a the very rare great grey shrike, a small bird of prey, famous for its practice of storing prey by impaling it on thorns.

Se, what were my impressions? Well, the size of the trees, both living and dead, are what mark this forest out as special, at least in European terms. Especially in the protected part, they give it an air of cathedral-like majesty. The richness of the fungal life, even in winter, was also remarkable. In fact, although it would have been lovely to see the park in snow,  we would have seen much less fungi in that event.

Now I have to go back and see it in Spring, when the ground flowers blossom.

 The exposed root system of a fallen tree.

 The fungus know as dead man's fingers

 Joanna and Nico demonstrating the size of a fallen log...

 And me showing the size of a standing tree

 A Russian hunting lodge

 Outside the protected area

 Scots pine

 Another fallen tree

Dinner in a Russian style restaurant

Thanks to Magdalena for most of the photos.