Homemade Crescent Rolls And The History Of Marmalade

Homemade crescents were in my mind for a long time but have never had marmalade good enough to make them. Marmalade is the key ingredient here and you must have the best one, otherwise you end up with the jam all in the tray and none left in the crescent.

In full covid-19 pandemic I bought some from the nearest grocery store and gave it a try last week.

The History Of Marmalade

The word "marmalade" is borrowed from the Portuguese marmelada, from marmelo 'quince'. source

Many don't know that quince, the fruit but especially the skin, the peel of the fruit is rich in pectin, the key ingredient responsible for gelification. The more pectin a fruit has, the easier to tor it into marmalade. Last year I made apple jam with no added sugar and used quince to make it gelatinous. It's perfect as it's natural, no chemicals added and healthy as well.

Back in the day when our grandmothers were forced to make everything at home, the most commonly used method to make marmalade was cooking the fruits for a day or two, till the water evaporated and the whole thing turned into marmalade, also adding sugar, a lot of it as it's known to preserve the fruits. Little had they know about how unhealthy and dangerous sugar is.

The funny thing is now they know and still there are products (jams) on the shelves that are made of 1/3 fruit and 2/3 sugar. This is wrong and whoever is responsible for controlling content, should stop this once and for all. It's time for people to wake up and stop buying these products and it's time for health officials to regulate the maximum content of sugar in a product, but be fair this time and not work for major companies that are ruling the world but for people. Their first priority should be health and not filling their pockets with bribe money.

Back to our grandmother's time, marmalade was made in copper caldrons and booked for two days to preserve it without sugar. I still remember that marmalade, especially the plum that is one of my favorite. It has a special flavor due to the copper caldron and it's something I will never have as no one is making it anymore.

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Luckily I was able to find some images to show you how it was done. This is a built in caldron that is heated with wood. Really oldschool.

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In order to steer constantly, you need a special tool if you don't want to get your hands burned. Plum jam is known to squirt during cooking and you don't want that hot jam on your skin for sure.

As I see these people were very inventive, they are using a rotating device that is steering the caldron without putting yourself in danger. It is operated manually but it's safe.

Marmalade Today

When I was a kid, food was scarce most of the time, ok, all the time to be fair but sometimes you could buy marmalade free. I mean you still had to pay for it but you did not need a food card for that. That marmalade was absolutely delicious. This needs to be taken with a pinch of salt as it may have tasted heavenly good because we rarely had sweets and anything sweet was good or indeed were good. We had nothing to compare it with, so let's just say it was good.

As I mentioned above, I got some marmalade from the store and when I got home, the first thing I did was taste it. Then came the disappointment. It tasted good although could not identify the fruit it was made of, but was more jelly, a lot of jelly, all jelly. Not at all what I expected.

Ingredients For The Dough

1kg all purpose flour,
300 ml lukewarm milk,
10g dry yeast or 5g fresh yeast,
1 tsp sugar,
300g 80% unsalted butter,
1 tsp salt,
2 tbsp sour cream,
1 egg + 2 yolks.

Add the dry ingredients to a mixing bowl, cut the cold butter into small cubes, add to the mix. Beat the egg and the yolks, mix with milk, add to the other ingredients, start kneading and make dough. You can also use a pastry blender but I don't have one, so I'm doing everything manually.

Cover with a clean cloth and rest for an hour in a warm place.

The Process

On a floured working surface, knead the dough for a couple of minutes, then roll it out. Don't have to be very thick, 0.5cm will do.

You have two options here.

Roll out the dough to have a rectangle shape and work from there, cut into two and cut triangles.

The other is to make a round shape and cut triangles out of it.

Equal proportion is something I need to work on, I know. It's hard to get equal triangles.

Because I'm working on a silicon mat, I'm using a tool like this which is very helpful.

This is the rectangle piece. As you can see, no symmetry between the pieces 🤷‍♀ but it was for us, not for any special event, so it's fine for practice.