Anyone who loves literature might be delighted to know how many times marmalade makes an appearance in the pages of some of our favorite childrens’ books as well as in grown-up literature. Of course, Paddington Bear loves marmalade so much it’s almost like a security blanket for him; (I can relate to that). When Alice finds herself tumbling down the rabbit hole in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, she picks up a jar called Orange Marmalade from a shelf—“but to her great disappointment, it is empty.” Look on Amazon, and you find that there are any number of children’s books and book series with main characters called Marmalade: Orlando the Marmalade Cat, A Star in a Marmalade Jar, Scotch Marmalade, Maine Marmalade, Marmalade Jim, The Mouse in the Marmalade. In the 1990s, the Japanese created The Marmalade Boy comic series, which became a television series, which became a movie, (which are now, alas, all out of print).
But it isn’t only in children’s literature that it appears. You’ll have to indulge me here, but even Shakespeare has Beatrice saying of Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing: “The Count is neither sad, nor sick, nor merry, nor well; but civil Count, civil as an orange, and something of that jealous complexion.” Although I may be stretching the point too far here, you have to admit, she is talking about an orange in a fairly complimentary way. Or maybe "civil" is just a pun on "Seville?" (We won’t mention here that in Shakespeare’s time, marmalade was usually made from quinces.)
Charles Ryder, the protagonist of Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited, at Oxford in the 1920s, ate his “scrambled eggs and bitter marmalade with the zest which in youth follows a restless night.” Unfortunately, in The Road to Wigan Pier, “a jar of marmalade on a sideboard, ‘an unspeakable mess of stickiness and dust,’ epitomized for George Orwell the complete squalor of a working-class household.” [1] One of the several points on which I have to disagree with George.
More recently, The Beatles sang about marmalade skies in “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and today, Christine Aguilera sings “Lady Marmalade.” “Bill Nighy and Geoffrey Whitehead starred in Marmalade for Comrade Philby, a play about a mediocre novelist who, on his occasional trips to Moscow, always visits the spy Kim Philby—material for a future book—and takes him a pot of his favorite Oxford marmalade (thick-cut).” [2]
And finally, Americans fans of Jan Karon’s popular Mitford books (about a small North Carolina town and its residents), know all about Esther Bolick, baker of a famous Orange Marmalade cake that is so sought after that it is the prize in raffles. (See January 20 blog entry for the recipe for this cake.)
I love this stuff; I really do. If any of my readers (all three of you) find another mention of marmalade in literature, would you please email it to me? In return, I promise to send you one of my jars of homemade pink grapefruit marmalade. (I have a lot to spare; I made 8 batches this winter.)
[1] R. W. Apple, Jr. (2002, March 27). This Blessed Plot, This Realm of Tea, This Marmalade. The New York Times, p. 1.
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