20 January 2024

Three days ago the temperature rose to almost 17° (62.5°F) and we were in a sweat over yet more distressing signs of global warming. Today the wind is howling straight off ice, freezing my fingers as I hung the washing on the line and taking the perceived temperature – according to my weather site – down to -2° (28°F), though to me it felt like about -10°.

Frustrating, though, because sitting inside looking out on the blue sky and dazzling sunshine, the only hints that being in my garden wouldn’t have been pleasant were tree branches dancing like crazy, and bluetits having a hard time landing on the flailing bird feeder.

I desperately need to get out there. My asparagus bed has disappeared under couch grass and weeds of every description, and is punctuated by a forest of runners from the damson trees which produced – then promptly dropped – their first ever fruit this summer. They’re clearly more interested in spreading than in fruiting.

And talking of first fruits… my bitter orange tree! Or more accurately, my bitter orange bush because since L saw that it had dropped its leaves in a particularly harsh patch of weather some years ago, presumed it was dead, and lopped it off near the base with his chainsaw (grrrrrr) it has been growing into an ever-larger ever-healthier ever-taller bush which looks lovely but does… nothing. Except this year. I noticed one little fruit in the summer and got very excited. But now that they’re ripe and coloured I see that there are six lovely oranges. It’s almost a crop! As I write I’m making marmalade with Seville oranges from my supplier in Sicily. This organic producer is my saviour through the winter, delivering citrus to me and to my little group of juicing friends. But I think our first ever home-grown oranges deserve a better showcase than that. Last year I made oranges in syrup from a friend’s recipe. I need to get her to repeat it for me, so I can rustle up a precious, special cru of our very own fruit.

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Clearing paths in the woods

I’ve just realised that we’ve reached the end of the boar-hunting season (16 January) and I haven’t railed even once against them this winter – because mostly they weren’t here. They’ve never graced us so little with their presence. Yes, there were a couple of occasions when they were blasting about somewhere in the valley, but as far as I can remember there was only one Sunday when I glimpsed them anywhere near our property. What can be the meaning of this? Frankly, I don’t care what it means. I’m just glad they opted for elsewhere – a blessed deliverance.

It has given our local trail clearer Pino a chance to get down there with his tools. He has tidied up the old path number two which had become very overgrown. In a neighbouring valley he has re-made the path which skirts around Mario Draghi’s border fence. And now he’s working on our path through our secret valley which he leapt at when L mentioned it to him. Loathe as I am to share in with anyone, we have been giving him a hand too. Its saving grace is that no one who isn’t a serious walker is going to be too keen to spend much time down there: there are steep and scrambly bits, and it’s not always obvious which way the path lies. It’s never going to be over-run with Sunday strollers.

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I’m most intrigued by this fascinating-fact email which was kindly sent to me by Google. That red pin right there in the centre is Pieve Suites. Of course I’d love to believe that 150,000 Google maps users have homed in and clicked on my little rental venture. But I have very serious doubts. That would mean that since September 2018 – when it appears I put my dot on there – 27,272 people have clicked on me every year, including all through lockdowns and travel bans. Is that even possible? Or does it simply mean that 150K Google maps users have idly opened up a page which happened to have my pin on it somehow? Is Google trying to make me feel triumphant about my own visibility? The danger is, though, that they might be having the opposite effect: I might be thrown into deep depression by how few of those 150,000 have been tempted to book.

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For some reason elderly men – possibly deaf, probably lonely elderly men – with very loud voices seem to have taken a liking to me recently.

Like the local in one of our little supermarkets, propping up the checkout though with no discernable goods he wished to purchase. It was a foul day and I’d been out walking somewhere, and I was swathed in big rainproof cape and wellies. “We’re never going to have snow like we did in the old days again!” he shouted. This was slightly incongruous because though it had been tipping down it wasn’t cold at all.

It was on the tip of my tongue to point out that in the old days people half froze to death in their tumbledown houses with snow blowing in under the doors and window frames. But I didn’t. He was so busy reformulating the same emphatic statement in different ways that I was pretty sure he wasn’t interested in my logic.

Another day, I’m having coffee with a friend in a bar in town. Once again a local is desperate to make friendly small talk with us from the table across the way, where he’s sitting by himself. But a second friend joins us and we continue in English. He goes back to his newspaper, and to sweeping the room for possible other people to chat with. There’s no one though, so by the time he gets up to leave I’m feeling a bit bad about having cut him off, and wish him a buona giornata. It’s all the invitation he needs.

“You’re Roman, aren’t you?” he says to one of my friends, who is indeed Roman. “I suppose you’re a guide and you’re going to take these two ladies around the sights.” My friend runs one of Rome’s loveliest libraries, and she tries to tell him as much, but by that time he has decided she’s a guide and isn’t in the least interested in what she has to say. “You know where you should take them? It’s a place where nobody ever goes – no one even knows about it.”
Oh really.
“It’s half way down via del Corso,” he shouts, getting very agitated. “It’s a treasure trove!”
Galleria Doria Pamphili? I suggest. After all, it’s one of Rome’s better known sights.
“Yes! yes!” but he manages to make it seems  as if he’s told us and not vice versa. “Galleria Doria Pamphili! It’s a wonder! No one even knows it, and there’s a Raphael!”
His other favourite place where my guide-not-guide friend absolutely has to take her charges? The Palatine.
“But you have to go before ten AM or it fills up with Romans.”
Unlikely, really, the Palatine being almost exclusively a tourist attraction these days but he’s right that it fills up – I’ll give him that. His eyes are glistening and he’s wrapt in his recollections.
“I was walking around the Palatine, lost in wonder, and suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder.” Dramatic pause for maximum effect. “It was Virgil, come to show me around,” he says. “I think it’s called Stendhal syndrome.” If only all tourists succumbed to the magic of history and beauty like that.

Bitter (Seville) orange marmalade

The first time I made bitter orange marmalade I used my lemon marmalade recipe, on the presumption that the two – both being citrus fruits – could be handled in more or less the same way. But my lemon version is a refined kind of affair, with delicate swirls of thin rind suspended in tart jelly. Not suitable, I realised, for Seville orange marmalade.

On subsequent occasions when L returned from the citrus-packed Amalfi Coast (he goes there regularly, to work on his Positano publication) with bags of the bitter fruit, I worked on a more aptly chunky result. What follows is a list of hints rather than a recipe. It looks long, but it’s more chat than blow-by-blow instructions, so don’t be alarmed. I’m hoping it makes sense.

Bitter (Seville) oranges – as many as you can find
Sugar – depends on oranges and taste
Water

Wash your oranges – which should be untreated on the outside and as organic as possible – very well to remove any dirt and residue. Chop each in half and squeeze it. As you work through your pile of fruit, put the juice in a large bowl (or better, straight into the large saucepan or preserving pan which you’ll use to make your marmalade). Keep the skins to one side. Keep the pips and any flesh removed by the juicer too, and put them into a muslin sack or jelly bag.

Now you’ll need to go back through the skins, one by one, using a teaspoon (or at least, I find that’s the best implement) scraping out all the pips, any remaining pulp and as much of the membrane that separates the segments as you can; place all this debris in the muslin sack or jelly bag with what was stuck in the juicer. You don’t have to be too thorough: any odd bits and bobs left clinging to the inside of the half-oranges will dissolve in the cooking process, but it doesn’t hurt to get the bulk out now.

Once you’ve completed this long process, an even longer one awaits: using the sharpest knife you can trust yourself with, slice the skins as thinly as you can. Or as thinly as you like. Because these pieces are what will give the marmalade that bitter-orange chunkiness. In my case it’s generally patience – or lack of it – that has the final word, but it’s up to you to decide how thick you want them.

As you chop, take care to discard stalks and blemished patches and anything that you don’t want appearing in the final product.

Put the strips of sliced peel into the bowl or saucepan with the juice. When you’ve finished, the juice will probably be almost invisible beneath the mound of peel. Add enough water to cover the peel comfortably – a hopelessly vague indication, I know, but that’s as precise as I can get. Pressing down gently on the peel with the flat of my hand to stop it from floating, I run cold water into the bowl until it barely covers the back of my hand. That should, more or less, do it.

Now find some way to suspend your muslin/jelly bag so that the pip+membrane mess is fully submerged among the peel+liquid. The former oozes wonderful natural pectin into the marmalade mix, helping it to set beautifully. Leave it like this overnight if you can.

Next morning, move the whole lot on to the stove. (Obviously, if your juice and peel is still in a bowl, you’ll need to transfer it into a suitably sized cooking pot.) With the muslin bag still suspended on top of the pot – its contents submerged in the peel+juice – heat the whole lot up slowly and allow it to bubble gently for an hour or so.

This stage of the process has two purposes. It softens the peel even more than the overnight soak did. Let it go on bubbling until the peel is nice and soft. (Remember also: if you’re using a wide-topped jelly bag like mine, that acts as a kind of lid, and the mix underneath is quite likely to boil over unless you watch it carefully.) The cooking also releases even more of that precious pectin: the mix will probably start looking deceptively jammy even before the sugar goes in.

When the peel is just right, remove the jelly bag and suspend it over a bowl to drip and cool. When the bag is no longer untouchably hot, put on some clean rubber gloves and squeeze all the viscous, slimy pectin-packed liquid you can into the bowl, then tip this into the saucepan. Even before you do, you can add your sugar to the pot and start the final stage of the jam making.

How much sugar you use will be dictated by how you like your marmalade. I like mine tinglingly bitter – the kind that makes your taste buds throb for hours after eating. So I do 50% sugar, ie if I have five litres of juice+peel, I’ll add around 2.5kg of sugar. I repeat though, this ratio is for bitter-orange extremists. A more ‘normal’ recommendation would be 1:1 (5 litres liquid, 5kg sugar); some people prefer less, some people more. It really depends how sweet your tooth is.

Now keep the mix at a gentle bubble, stirring regularly to stop it from sticking or boiling over, until it shows the usual signs of gelling. This could take an hour, or even two. How long depends on the pectin content of the fruit, on the amount of sugar you use (more sugar, less boiling, as a rule) and on the time and effort you put into ‘milking’ pectin from your jelly bag, as those slimy gloopy drops contain the precious gelling agent that will do the trick for you.

You’ll know when it’s done when your sugar thermometre reaches 103° (one degree less, more or less, for each 100m above sea level) or when, if you dribble some hot liquid on to a saucer and let it cool right down, the beautiful amber gel forms a slightly crinkly skin as you draw a finger through it. Purists keep a pile of saucers in the fridge for this purpose, to make cooling and testing a speedier affair. I can’t be bothered, and my decision to call the marmalade ready is educated-guess work. Beware though that if you over-cook it, the marmalade will set to a soft sticky toffee once it has cooled down in its jars: absolutely delicious, but not necessarily the consistency you were expecting.

There are instructions for sterilising jars here. When it’s ready, leave the marmalade mix to sit for five minutes or so, in order to minimize the risk of cracking jars with this ultra-boiling liquid, then spoon it into the hot, sterilised containers, up to about 1cm or slightly less from the top, and put the sterilised lids on tightly straight away. Never fiddle with the lids once the cooling-down process begins: the vacuum seal that forms inside between marmalade and lid will preserve the jam for months – even years… though chances are, it’ll be eaten long before you can test this theory.