Photo Friday: Seville Oranges

by Jodi ~ February 19, 2010

Seville oranges, halfway to being marmalade

Bitter. Oh, so bitter. Yet intensely fragrant. A fruit of perfect balance.

That’s the calling card of the Seville orange (Citrus aurantium), also known as the sour orange or bigarade. Its fleeting season, a scant few weeks in the dead of winter, makes this fruit’s appearance at markets a much-anticipated event.

With thick, pockmarked, and highly fragrant skin that blushes a deep red-orange with maturity and tart, bitter, and seedy pulp packed with pectin and Vitamin C, the Seville orange has become a favourite fruit for cooking down with sugar to make marmalade. Hie thee to the market. Get some before they’re gone.

About Seville Oranges

Sour oranges flourish in subtropical climates and are hardy — they can stand short periods of frost; the oldest trees in Spain are said to be 600 years old
The tree’s origins are believed to be in southeast Asia. Arabs carried the sour orange to Arabia in the 9th century; it is reported to have been found growing in Sicily by 1002 A.D. and cultivated in Seville, Spain, by the end of the 12th century
Explorers brought the sour orange to the Americas, and it became a Floridian export crop by 1763
Budwood of sweet orange was first grafted onto sour orange trees in the American south; subsequently the sour orange became more widely grown for rootstock than its fruit
Today, sour orange orchards and groves are only common in areas where the plant’s special products have economic value: southern Europe, northern and tropical Africa, the Middle East, India, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and some regions of South America
In Cuba the tree’s wood is used to make baseball bats

Culinary Uses of Seville Oranges

Sour orange is a key ingredient in a drink called “Smoking Bishop,” mentioned in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (the fruit is boiled with cloves, red wine, sugar, and water)
High vitamin C levels made it a good candidate for warding off scurvy; the bitter pulp was sprinkled with sugar to make the fruit edible for this purpose
A popular way to eat the fruit in Mexico is halved, salted, and coated in chiles
Essential oil from the dried peel of immature fruit is used to make liqueurs such as cointreau, grand marnier, and triple sec; oil from the peel is also used as flavouring in candy, baked goods, gum, soft drinks, and pharmaceuticals
The tart juice of the sour orange is prized for its flavour in ades and for cooking fish (South America) and meat (Spain); in the Yucatán it is used like vinegar and in Egypt it is fermented to produce wine
Sour orange is used most popularly in marmalade, with England and Scotland importing significant quantities of the fruit destined to be preserved this way (Seville orange marmalade recipes: BBC Good Food; Simply Recipes; David Lebovitz; Canadian Living)