Seville Oranges

Thank goodness, the last of the snow has melted, at least here in London, so at least for the time being, we are having a respite from the worst of the winter. Several people have been telling me they remember the winter of 1963, here in England. No doubt we will be remembering the winter of 2010.

One of the things I always look forward to in January is the appearance of Seville oranges in the shops. I first started looking for Seville oranges not for making marmalade, but because I had some Mexican and Spanish recipes that called for Seville orange juice. Since I didn't come from an orange-growing country, I had no idea at what time of year they might be in season. Of course, once I managed to find some Seville oranges and extract the juice, it seemed a shame not to make marmalade out of the skins. Now we regularly look forward to Seville oranges in January. We freeze the juice for use in cooking, and we make marmalade. These days, D is the marmalade maker in our house. I have recently been noticing several recipes which make use of marmalade, such as Marmalade Gingerbread, from Rachel's Favorite Food for Friend's, a chocolate marmalade cake from Rachel Allen's Bake, and an orange marmalade cake recipe from Jane Asher's Beautiful Baking.

The first marmalade recipe that I had bookmarked, however, was a recipe for Orange Marmalade Ice Cream from Sophie's Table by Sophie Grigson. At first I thought it was a bit strange. In all my years of ice cream eating in Canada when I must have tried just about every flavour of ice cream produced by Baskin-Robbins I had never come across orange marmalade ice cream. But every time I leafed through the book and saw the recipe, it grew on me a little more. I thought that the flavour combination might just work. Apart from that, the recipe was very simple, just double cream and marmalade. I also thought the texture of the marmalade might just help to prevent large ice crystals forming when the ice cream freezes, an important consideration since we don't have an ice cream maker. So I decided to give it a go, and we were delighted with the result, both taste- and texture-wise. Here is the recipe.

Marmalade Ice-Cream with Walnut Sauce.
Recipe from Sophie's Table by Sophie Grigson.

For the ice cream:
375 g Seville orange marmalade
300 ml double cream

Put the marmalade into a large bowl and beat. Whip the cream until stiff, then fold into the marmalade. Freeze.

That's it.

The ice cream doesn't need beating as it freezes, and it is soft enough to serve straight from the freezer.

The book also gives a recipe for an orange and walnut sauce to serve with the ice cream, but since, apart from the occasional banana split (it's actually many, many years since I had one), I usually eat ice cream on its own, I decided to give it a miss. The ice cream was very rich and perfectly fine without the sauce.