Living in 1834

From one century to the next, people, governments and have had a tendency towards reinventing words. Nomenclature and jargon that already exist becomes appropriated and transformed from the once known to the domain of the ‘new’ or unknown. I guess a bit like when an old historic company decides to revamp its logo or a person changes their name.

In my serialized book ‘1834' there are many names which have left me quite confused but fortunately thanks to the great wealth of on-line digital libraries that we now have at hand I’ve been able to ‘translate’ these words.

The first one was Gravel. Now for me this was something I’d put on my driveway rather than an ailment requiring medication. Well Gravel was the old name for kidney stones and I guess if you had enough of them maybe your could actually pave your driveway… :)

Hello my word detectives, my Cadfael’s of the corpus! Today we’re going to look at marmalade.

The word most likely originated from the Portugeuse marmelada which was a sweet preserve made from the quince fruit (marmelo in Portuguese). In Spanish mermelada is the name for jam. So we could say that all fruit conserved in sugar originated with he name marmalade.

And potentially since oranges and lemons were most likely imported to the UK from Spain and Portugal the name marmalade most likely stuck :)

Word aside the actual breakfast conserve we put on our table today and that famous little bear packed in a sandwich under his little hat, most likely came about as a kind of accident.

In order that the fruit didn’t spoil it would be packed in salt in wooden barrels. And guess what? Yep, you got it, by the end of the journey it would be lacto-fermented and be somewhat sweet and sour tasting.

If you conserve oranges or lemons in a 2 per cent salt solution and leave them a week or so you’ll find they end up tasting very much like marmalade (but without the heavy sugar).

When cooks were confronted with bitter Seville oranges the salting before arrival would reduce the bitterness before adding sugar and transforming into jam substance.