BITTERSWEET STAR OF BRITISH BREAKFASTS (Published 1985) (2024)

The scene was a small literary dinner party near Regent's Park in London. One smart young woman, her face dusted with sparkle, gave out a sigh of relief as she collapsed into a chair. The weekend had been a fatiguing one, she said - she had spent it in the country making marmalade with her mother.

Nor was she alone. From the end of January, when the bitter oranges from the Spanish province of Seville make their brief appearance at the greengrocers, it seems as if all England and Scotland stays home making marmalade. As the young woman put it, ''one has to be nippy'' to get the year's supply of marmalade made in time.

For generations of American travelers, the bittersweet taste of orange marmalade at breakfast is as much a part of the quintessential trip to Britain as strong tea and warm beer. Thanks to the growing number of imported brands, these travelers can more easily duplicate that taste at home. However, Great Britain has a marmalade culture that goes beyond what anyone in the United States might imagine - and it has nothing to do with the pale American variety.

I am a great consumer of the Seville orange marmalade that is commercially made in Britain. But I had not appreciated either the logistical problems of a national food dependent on the import of a foreign product - one with a short season to boot - or the British preference for homemade marmalade that ranges from light, almost transparent jelly to a thick, dark substance laced with chewy shredded peel. One develops a palate for marmalade as one does for wines and spirits - and, like fine wines, marmalade improves with age: its taste peaks at five years.

The Citrus aurantium, or Seville orange (spelled ''civil'' in earlier times and still pronounced so in Britain), has been arriving in British ports from Spain since the late 15th century and has always been treated as a delicacy in various cooked forms. But its appearance at the breakfast table as marmalade goes back only 200 years. Perhaps no other culinary subject in Great Britain garners as many different opinions as does the question of the historical origins and correct forms of marmalade, and certainly no other foodstuff traveled the empire so widely. English marmalade crisscrossed the world on the paths of British conquest: Even Martha Washington had her own orange marmalade recipe at Mount Vernon.

And now, just as the Seville orange marmalade market is experiencing new growth in the British food halls, a librarian at the University of Leeds, C. Anne Wilson, has written a delightful, definitive study called ''The Book of Marmalade,'' to be published this month by the London establishment of Constable & Company, 10 Orange Street (no joke). Her book is a veritable saga intertwining the customs of many European cultures that culminated in the creation of breakfast marmalade, the recipes for which were subsequently disseminated all over the English world, including India, where bitter oranges could be found before their trek across the Arab world into Spain.

Today's marmalade is a combination of two different recipes that eventually merged. Marmalade was originally a conserve of quince and the name derived from the Portuguese word marmelo, meaning simply quince. This is clearly the definition Dr. Johnson assigns to it as late as 1755 in his ''Dictionary of the English Language.'' It came in brick form and was served sliced as a dessert, a favorite of Henry VIII.

Elizabeth I had a passion for sweetmeats, and one served at her banquet table was succade - made, Miss Wilson writes, ''of citrus fruits or their peels, soaked and boiled several times in plain water.'' Like quince marmalade, this candied bitter-orange peel in syrup acquired a medicinal reputation as a good digestive, and some say that Mary, Queen of Scots, concocted the first orange marmalade to combat seasickness (mal de mer) as she crossed over to Scotland from Calais in 1561: ''Marmalade pour Marie malade'' or ''Marmalade pour ma maladie'' are the cries attributed to her. During the next hundred years there began to appear recipes for marmalade using Seville oranges, which like quinces were rich in pectin.

How delighted Elizabethan audiences must have been to hear this favored fruit the subject of a pun in Shakespeare's ''Much Ado About Nothing.'' In the play, Beatrice says of Claudio: ''The Count is neither sad, nor sick, nor merry, nor well; but civil Count, civil as an orange, and something of that jealous complexion.''

James Keiller & Son Ltd. of Scotland, founded in 1797 and producer of Dundee Orange Marmalade, is generally credited with being the first large-scale commercial producer of marmalade. The initiative came from Janet Keiller, mother of the company's founder. Her husband, a grocer, bought cheaply a cargo of Seville oranges from a ship that took refuge from a storm in Dundee harbor. She used the bitter oranges to make pots of the dark shredded or ''chip'' marmalade for which the company is still famous.

It was just prior to this time, also in Scotland, that Seville orange marmalade first became a breakfast food, the reason being that it was a good digestive and therefore warming to an empty stomach after a night's fast. None other than Dr. Johnson and James Boswell documented this new custom of toast and marmalade on their 1773 tour of the Hebrides. By that time, ''marmalade'' used alone always meant Seville orange marmalade and not quince, as Dr. Johnson had recorded earlier: the tide had turned. In current usage, any other kind of marmalade must bear additional description: Lemon marmalade, grapefruit marmalade, three- fruit marmalade and so on.

Though traditionally women were the makers of marmalade, men seem to be more particular about its taste and consistency. Janet Clarke, who sells antiquarian cookbooks in Bath and makes a superb marmalade herself, recalls a young woman who was told out of the blue one morning by her husband, ''Heather, darling, I'm leaving you,'' whereupon he moved in with another woman a few doors away. Three days later he was back to ask his wife for a few pots of her homemade marmalade with the excuse, '' She doesn't make it well, and I can't stand store-bought marmalade.'' His wife gave him all her marmalade and told him never to return.

For women who wish to make the appearance of storing homemade marmalade, the answer is Huffkins, a small bread-and-cake shop in the Cotswold village of Burford. Here, each February for 40 years, Cicely Lomas has cooked up 25 44-pound boxes of Seville oranges, which she distributes in 6,000 jars.

If your man went to Oxford, he probably still prefers Frank Cooper's ''Oxford'' Course Cut Marmalade, since Cooper's, made in Oxford, has been supplying the colleges since 1874, where undergraduates, who are said to have called it ''squish,'' acquired a lifelong taste for thick dark marmalade. This may also be why Cooper's is the preferred brand in the seats of social power, the men's clubs on St. James's Street.

Early morning commuters are also served Cooper's ''Oxford'' marmalade at the famous breakfasts on British Rail, and the company holds the Royal Warrant, meaning its marmalade is purchased for the royal households. The label bears the royal insignia and the inscription ''By Appointment to Her Majesty the Queen.''

To serve Seville orange marmalade, one needs that other English invention, the jam spoon, which has a faintly triangular bowl. The pointed end cleans out the bottom of the jar whereas the top points finish off the extra marmalade that collects under the neck. It completes the perfect experience.