One thing we owe to Michael Pollan and his insightful writings on food and the North American diet, is an awakening to the notion that foods are best and most delicious in those times of the year in which they naturally come into season. Although this is on one hand stupefyingly obvious, when the knowledge is focused, as Pollan and others have enjoined us to do, the results can be quite incredible.

Here,  in the full bloom of citrus season, with not much freelance work on the table, we embarked upon the project of making marmalade from the Seville oranges now abundant in the stores. These, we are told, are the very best oranges to use for marmalade. Our results, using brown sugar held to the tart end of the taste spectrum, were dark and bitterly beautiful, leaving us with an unfulfilled desire to make more.

Blood oranges came next. The rose pink product so produced involved less trimming and shredding since whole slices of the unpeeled fruit went directly into the pot, but not before we held a few of them up to window light where their richly mottled colour put us in mind of stained glass. 

From oranges we moved to lemons and limes, producing small precious  batches of both marmalade and curd. My husband, who is the baker at our house, is mastering cream scones, so with tea by the fire in the late afternoons, our madness for marmalade will help take the edge off the long days of winter on the farm.