I’m throwing it all out there, swinging for the fences, giving it the old 1, 2 knockout. What is the difference between the two? Is it because one is citrus the other fruit? If that is true then why can people get away with saying “onion marmalade?” Is it because one is made witht he the softening of the rind and the other not, only because fruits don’t really have rinds? Is it because you use the pulp from the choosen ingredient, because if thats the case Herve This contradicts that in his book Molecular Gastronomy, saying you can use the pulp as a thickening agent in both cases?
Looking up the word “marmalade” on dictionary.com tells me that the origin of the word “marmelada” (1515-25) is actually a quince jam.
So the question I pose to anyone reading this is to give me some feedback, because i stand in the middle of the fight and i don’t want to get caught looking in the other direction.
Great post.. I dig where you are coming from. It seems that there are a lot of interesting food cross overs out there. Such as tomato versus duck confit (maybe another post all together?)
I dug in to ‘On Food’ – Harold McGee’s epic food book – and he suggests that marmalde (and marmalada) comes from a greek word ‘melimelon’ which indeed refers to the preservation of quince in honey. This I think, is the delineation between jam and marmalade. Originally, marmalade’s were used as a means to preserve fruit. So in the case of quince, pieces were ‘immersed in syrupy honey’ in order to preserve them. Jams and jellies came along when it was discovered that cooking fruit and sugars ‘developed a texture that neither could achieve on its own.’
According to McGee, when fruit is cooked with sugar, the naturally occurring pectin begins to bond directly with itself, which causes the mixture to firm up, giving us a dense jammy, gel like substance. In other words, jam.
However, I doubt very much that there is much of a difference between the two processes today. Modern orange marmalade is probably technically a jam and the term refers to the flavor more then any thing else.