Renaissance Marmalet Recipes

How To Make Authentic Renaissance Marmalets For Your Next Theme Banquet Or Renaissance Faire

These Renaissance marmalet recipes make a delicious fruit conserve that tastes similar to today's marmalades, but is much smoother and thicker, more like today's candy.

This well-liked, colorful sweetmeat was once stored in airtight jars or boxes and often cut into lozenge-sized pieces, or a variety of fancy shapes for serving. Popular Elizabethan confectionery shapes for marmalet were diamonds, spades, clubs, and hearts. Made using natural fruit flavors and colors, it's a very decorative dessert for the table.

Marmalet was originally made of apples, but later, cherries and apricots were used. Oranges and lemons, however, were not used for marmalades until the latter part of the sixteenth century as they were unavailable.

Marmalet is delicious, and these Renaissance marmalet recipes are definitely worth trying.

If you have difficulty reading the Early-Modern-English style of writing, or you need to shed light on any outdated ingredient names and cooking terms used in the Renaissance dessert recipes, please refer to...

The Renaissance Dessert Recipes Glossary

To make Orange Marmalet

Take Oranges, pare them thin as you can, boil them in four feveral waters; let them be very foft before you take them out, then take two quarts of Spring-water, put thereto twenty Pippins pared, quartered and coared, let them boil till all the vertue be out; take heed they do not lofe the colour; then ftrain them, put to every pint of water a pound of Sugar, boil it almoft to a Candy height, then take out all the meat out of the Oranges, flice the peel in long flits as thin as you can, then put in your peel with the juyce of two Lemons, and one half Orange, then boil it to a Candy.

To make Marmalet of any tender Plum

Take your Plums, and boil them between two difhes on a Chafing-difh of coals, then ftrain it, and take as much Sugar as the Pulp do weigh, and put to it as much Rofe-water, and fair water as will melt it, that is, half a pint of water to a pound of Sugar, and fo boil it to a Candy height, then put the pulp into hot Sugar, with the pap of a roafted apple. In like manner you muft put roafted Apples to make Pafte Royal of it, or elfe it will be tough in the drying.

To make Marmalade of Apricocks

Take Apricocks, pare them and cut them in quarters, and to every pound of Apricocks put a pound of fine Sugar, then put your Apricocks into a Skillet with half of the Sugar, and let them boil very tender and gently, and bruife them with the back of a Spoon, till they be like Pap, then take the other part of the Sugar, and boil it to a Candy height, then put your Apricocks into that Sugar, and keep it ftirring over the fire, till all the Sugar be melted, but do not let it boil, then take it from the fire, and ftir it till it be almoft cold; then put it in Glaffes, and let it have the Air of the fire to dry it.

A pretty Sweet-meat with Rofes and Almonds

Warning: Make sure the rose petals you use are 100 percent organically grown without the use of pesticides or chemical fertilizers.

Take half a Pound of Blanched Almonds beaten very fine with a little Rofewater, two Ounces of the Leaves of Damask Rofes beaten fine, then take half a pound of Sugar, and a little more, wet it with water, and boil it to a Candy height, then put in your Almonds and Rofes, and a grain of Musk or Ambergreece, and let them boil a little while together, and then put it into Glaffes, and it will be a fine fort of Marmalade.