Appeared in Kulturanthropologinnen im Dialog: Ein Buch fuer und mit Ina- Maria Greverus, edited by Anne Claire Groffmann, Beatrice Ploch, Ute Ritschel, and Regina Roemhild (Koenigstein/Taunus: Ulrike Helmer Verlag, 1997), pp. 233-246. =============================================================== Messages in a Bottle Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett Anthropology of the far is always also an implicit anthropology of the near. While shock unsettles the taken for granted and brings it into focus, anthropology of the familiar operates directly on the ground of the quotidian, the mundane, the banal. It is boredom that brings the habitual into awareness. But what kind of awareness? For Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space, the daydream, where where memory and imagination meet, is the site of poetic truth. The writing that follows is not so much about the everyday as it is part of it. First thing in the morning or last thing at night, alert or tired, I released myself into the uneventfulness of my ordinary days. I do not normally keep a diary or journal or write personal letters. Nor do I keep fieldwork notes on my life, though I like to say that life is a field trip and I often take an ethnographic interest in it. What gave such urgency to the writing on this occasion--what made the ordinary luminous-- was my sister. I was in New Zealand. She was in Canada. Late at night, when pain would not let her sleep, she would look for me in her electronic mailbox. Like messages in a bottle, my words would wash up on the shores of cyberspace. Anthropologists need never be bored. They need only move into ethnographic mode, to switch the channel, something I have often done. This time, however, it was not boredom from which ethnography would spare me. Rather, ethnography had armed me for the imminence of death and I found myself writing into its face. * Talked to Lina this morning. She was born in Scotland, in a small fishing village outside of Aberdeen, and came to New Zealand as a young woman. At 86, Lina and her friends keep close track of each other with calls and visits and intimate knowledge of each other's routines. Any deviation spells trouble. But, she's quick to explain, "We don't live in each other's pocket's you know." Her telephone life, a web of voices emanating from the receiver, a switchboard of her friends and relatives, sustains her. I call Lina around 9:30 each morning. Sadie, her sister, calls her at 9:00. She calls Sadie at 6:00. It is all very precise and regular. Lina is Max's aunt, his mother's sister. After Max returned to New York--I stayed in Auckland for another five weeks--Lina invited me to eat with her once a week. The night arrived. Lina was waiting with dinner. The front porch light was on and the door open. I brought her a few lemons from my tree for a Delicious Pudding, a very lemony pudding with grated peel that I adore. The mixture bakes in a pyrex dish, set in a pan of water. The miracle of Delicious Pudding is that it starts out as one batter but ends up in two layers, the bottom a lemon custard and the top almost a meringue. She has been planning my birthday meal. We'll have Delicious Pudding and pizza. Lina's pizza is an archeological wonder, a virtual time capsule of New Zealand history in food. She starts with scone dough. Since it's wasteful to turn the whole oven on just to make scones, the day she makes pizza Lina also makes scones from the same dough. The scones are also a way to use up some extra cream. We would have those scones with a cup of tea for dessert. Now that Max has left, she explained, there were to be no more puddings. Not good for us. She never makes them when she is on her own. But for Max, that's different. As for scones, she usually wraps up a few for me to take home for the morning and saves a few for the next day, no doubt to take to Sadie. She tells me that if they dry out, just run them under the tap and tuck them in the oven and they'll be as good as new. To continue with the pizza. On this scone dough, which has been pressed into a little round pan with holes in the bottom, she spreads a tin of Wattie's spaghetti in tomato sauce and on top of that a finely chopped onion, fresh cherry tomatoes halved, grated yellow cheese, and, on her half, two kinds of bacon. Some people add a layer of creamed corn and even pineapple. The pie tin goes onto a cookie sheet and the pizza bakes in the oven till it bubbles and develops a lovely golden top. It is a perfect meal for two because what is left can be heated up the next day. She always sends me home with a slice and saves a slice for Sadie. Weeks later, when I gave Sadie the focaccia I made, she cut it into wedges, toasted it, and ate it with marmalade for breakfast, the dried tomatoes and rosemary topping notwithstanding. Instantly localized. It was her first encounter with focaccia and she immediately knew what to do with it. Tonight, for a change, Lina's making fresh fish. She hates fish, but feels challenged to come up with meatless meals for me. Her head thrown back, nostrils flaring, she gestures with her hands in the air to show me how she washed the fish several times and patted it dry with paper towels. The fish recipe came from Muriel, her friend nearby. Lina prepared the trevally in the oven with a little sherry and dried mushroom soup to season the sauce--the recipe is written out on scrap of paper that she keeps with her essential recipe collection in a plastic bag in a kitchen drawer. Dinner gets dished up with mashed kumaras, imported fresh green beans, broccoli with a little grated cheddar cheese--all the vegetables boiled, the water poured off--and a fresh hothouse tomato. Kumaras are sweet potatoes and for centuries a staple of New Zealand's Maori people. They have bright purplish burgundy skin and creamy sweet flesh. She chills a glass of water for me that she has covered with a little plastic shower cap so it will not pick up any smells from the refrigerator (really, a glass of thoughtfulness). We always debate whether the veggies are done. Lina says I like them with "a bone in," which means still somewhat crisp. And, then, with good appetite we tackle this beautiful food, the steam rising from the plates, which she runs under boiling water to heat them up. Food has to be piping hot, the kitchen windows all steamed up, our faces flushed. Partly that's because there is no central heat and people find ingenious ways to warm the little spot they feel--their beds, their food, the little space in which they are sitting, their skin. And, for older people with false teeth, they will not feel the warmth of the food in their mouth if it is not very hot. We sit at this lovely table, set with a clean cloth. Place mats with scenes of old English cottages protect the table from the hot plates or any wetness. Fresh flowers (camellias, daisies, frisia, rosemary, lavender) from my garden stand in an old vase. The space heater's coils glow incandescent orange. There is also a basket covered with a white cloth napkin. Part way through our piping hot meal, Lina suggests I peek. Rock cakes. Lovely, golden rock cakes. With currants and bits of candied peel. She made them yesterday. We finish up with a hot cup of tea. Always, she remarks that she pays a bitty more and that this tea is specially good. We talk about the food as we eat. About the pleasure. We talk. She hasn't been doing well at bridge for the last two months, after winning steadily, and is feeling discouraged. Cards are her divinatory medium. She reads human character at the card table. She reads life's lessons in the hand she's dealt. She lives out her life's principles in the way she plays the game. Her partner has diabetes and her eyesight is very bad--"Their eyes do go," she explains. Even with heart trouble and several hip operations, her friend takes two buses to come to play bridge, so keen is she on the game. With a mixture of fury and compassion, Lina tells me that "Flo makes a terrible lot of mistakes." The issue is not so much the game as the fear of senility. Cards exercise and test short term memory. This time there was an added factor. Her neighbor's husband had just died and Flo was upset. "We must be tolerant of one another," Lina bites her tongue. She plans for their next game. Flo will play to the west, with her back to the window. The light will fall on the cards. Lina remembers compassion and patience and the cardinal principle of never hurting someone else. Lina reads the obituaries in the New Zealand Herald every day without fail. She was shaken to learn that one of her bridge friends had died just a few hours after getting home from their last game. "Oh," she said, "I wish I could go like that." She hoped that at the next bridge game, all the players would stand for a moment of silence. The doctor tells Lina how proud he is of her good health. She is, he says, his best patient, and is sure to live many more years. Lina confides to me that she tried to hush the doctor up. A week after a doctor gave her brother Bill a clean bill of health and projected a long life, he promptly died. Nonetheless, Lina now feels confident she'll make it to ninety and is thinking about the celebration. She casts back over each marker--Betty made her a birthday party for her 60th, 70th, and 80th, and for the years between, Lina takes out all her surviving siblings for a birthday smorgasbord. The topic turns to family. Lina recalls her mother's death. It is not the first time she has described it to me. The body releasing itself from within, expelling its contents from the mouth and the bowel. Lina and her siblings gathered round the bed. The doctors were not of much help. Lina was the one who cared for her mother, right to the very end. When she and her husband Reg went on vacation, Lina took mother with. She confessed, "You know, I always put mother first." To Reg, she would say, "We'll have plenty of time on our own when mother is gone." That was not to be, for Reg passed away before his time. Life's lesson in all of this was the shame of illness, the secrecy, and the inability, the unwillingness, to seek medical attention, something that worries Lina today when it comes to her sister Sadie. Some time after she died, mother appeared by Lina's side--a phantom. Just once. Then there is the long period of caring for Max's mother, who had decided to die years before she was taken. Lina knew Dora was declining the moment she could not see well enough to do her crochet. Crochet was Dora's mandala, a geometry in thread, whose loops repeated themselves endlessly to form a perfect pattern. Crochet everywhere, on the backs and arms of chairs, on tables, placemats and coasters and runners and whole tablecloths. Ecru cotton, a single thread twisted and curled and knotted into lacy webs make a soft perforated skin for the furniture. Whenever Dora made a mistake, which became more frequent, she would rip out all the work she had done. The frustration became unbearable. But it was on the matter of scones that Lina finally put her foot down. Dora loved to make scones, girdle scones, on an old cast iron girdle- -a flat disk of black iron from which arose a semicircular wire handle attached at either side. This girdle, what I know as a griddle, now sits on a shelf under the sink. Lina was thinking of getting rid of it. Someone had given it to Dora when she first came to new Zealand in the 1920s. Knowing how much I would love to have it, Lina will save it for me. Lina's great fear was that Dora would set the place on fire making scones. Her eyesight was failing. She was no longer able to crochet. She was no longer able to make scones. Her sense of smell gone, food lost its taste and much of its pleasure. Death took its own good time in coming and Dora was impatient for its arrival. Max makes our evening. His call from New York arrived just as we are having tea. Nine o'clock and time for me to go. Lina seems a little tired tonight. She hadn't slept well the last few nights. I call Alert Taxi and within minutes a Samoan driver is there to take me home. Lina tucks gifts of food into my basket--tree tomatoes (my favorite fruit), five rock cakes (all that are left), and two oranges from a friend's tree. I'm feeling badly about not bringing more than three miserable lemons from my tree. Last week I brought flowers from my garden and they are still fresh and looking lovely on her table. Lina has been cooking meals for me for months. And, way back at the beginning of my visit, she remembered the one meal I cooked for her and for Max's mother, many many years ago, when they still lived downtown. I think it may have been my very first visit to New Zealand in 1972, just eight years after Max and I were married. Wracking my brains to think of what these two wonderful cooks would enjoy, I came up with a cheese souffle (copied out from a Julia Child cookbook that I read in a book shop) for the miracle of its aerial performance, glazed carrots--sweetness is always appreciated--and a crusty baguette swathed with sweet butter, fresh garlic, and parsley. I do not recall the other elements. This visit I proposed to cook a few dinners, starting with a repeat of the original one. Lina was delighted with the proposal. She wondered if I had forgotten my offer to cook the original dinner again. I don't believe I've made another souffle since that fondly remembered one. Dinner is set for next week. Lina's sister Sadie, who is 79, will join us and possibly her son Ross. Lina reminds me that Ross never passes up a game of canasta and, with four of us, we could play canasta after dinner. That would make the evening more like a party. Over dinner tonight, I ask Lina about what she likes to eat, just so I can bring her appropriate gifts of food. Women constantly circulate food gifts--from their kitchen, their garden, or from shops, where they purchase items they know to be favorites. The ultimate gift is a full meal. Food trails make tangible the web of their relationships and mark out their histories in the most personal and material ways. Food exchanges literally embody those relationships each time a gift passes the body's portal, the mouth. Yvonne, a beautiful Maori woman who lives next door, has been bringing grapefruit for weeks. She just gave Lina a big jar of soup. Lina gives the grapefruit to me. I make candied peel and marmalade and give them to friends who do not make their own. Lina makes a hot meal for Stuart, when he comes to cut the lawn. She knows his favorite foods. Each person has a distinctive food print, its clarity an indication of the close fit between the recipient's general preferences and the cook's forte. The relationship is defined by this repertoire and performed in food exchanges. Sadie sometimes withholds the pleasure of gifting by refusing to receive. She insists that Lina have lunch at her place, but is sometimes reluctant to receive Lina's food gifts. When they play canasta now--Bruce and Betty will come by on a Monday and Sadie will join them at Lina's--they have a cup of tea and one dry biscuit. Not like the old days, when melting moments, rock cakes, scones and pikelets, shortbread, tutti-frutti, and other sweets would make their way out of jars and from under tea towels. Now, everyone is watching their diets and their hearts. Why make rock cakes, as Lina did for me, when everyone will refuse them? "I didn't come down in the last shower," Lina demurs. Reconnaissance complete, I fall asleep and wake up the next day thinking about the meal. The main act will be the cheese souffle--its magical inflation never fails to stop the breath. Lina has a Teflon pan with high sides, a gift she has never used. I think it will work. Flavorful carrots freshly dug and glazed. Garlic bread. Lina offers to cook some sausages for Ross. Or, to take a piece of corned beef out of the deep freeze and boil it in its own plastic bag. A souffle would never be substantial enough for a man. As for veggies, she murmurs, "Potatoes." I'll surprise them with potatoes roasted with olive oil, garlic, and fresh rosemary till they are golden and crisp, the centres like cream. Broad bean shoots, steamed and dressed with lemon and a little butter, will be our green vegetable. I found them at the Kelmarna Farm around the corner. Lina offers to do the pudding--either her apple pie in short biscuit crust or, my preference, Delicious Pudding. Oddest thing, sitting here in New Zealand planning a meal for these old Scottish women and reading Elizabeth David explain French cooking to British readers in the fifties--anticipating their likes and dislikes, what they can find, and how they might respond to the cuisine she presents. Through this little meal, Elizabeth will speak to Lina and Sadie. We wash up the dishes and as the water gets sucked down the drain with a big noise, threatening to take us with it, Lina nods approvingly, "Good suction." Then, at precisely 8:00 pm, we turn on the t.v. to check the Lotto numbers, buoyed by the promise of millions of dollars for the winner. Very intense concentration, great hope, crushing disappointment, resignation, and a few phone calls, regular as clockwork, to a sister and cousin, both of them advanced in years to compare results. Turns out my birthday gift is to be a $5.00 Lotto ticket tucked into a beautiful birthday card, placed beside my plate at my birthday dinner. I've planned my food gifts for the occasion of my meal for them. Everyone gets: 6 big brown organic eggs with deep orange yolks; 100 grams of locally made rich blue vein cheese; a lettuce freshly pulled from the ground; a lemon from my tree (Meyer lemons are so hard to get in New York), dried persimmon slices, and a jar of Potage Bonne Femme from the recipe in Elizabeth David's French Provincial Cooking that I picked up today in a used bookshop. The centrepiece is my candied grapefruit peel. Citrus. Abundance beyond ingenuity. The trees strain under the weight of grapefruits. Lemons are so plentiful that you cannot give them away. In the absence of an abundance of oranges, all citrus, it seems, aspires to the status of an orange. Even their names say so. Poorman's Orange is an old grapefruit variety, the first type to be grown in New Zealand. Morrison's Seedless, an improved version of Poorman's Orange, is what many people grow in their gardens. Meyer lemons are prolific here too. Gillian Painter, a New Zealand food writer, says they were discovered in China and may be a cross between an orange and a lemon. The Meyer lemons and Poorman's Orange grow prodigiously in the cool temperate rainforest climate of the North Island. A few weeks ago, when Max and I visited Babich Winery outside Swanson, near Auckland, there was a box of lemons at the door for visitors to help themselves. I'm lucky I can pass my lemons along. Several people told me that in the past the Lion's Club used to do a grapefruit drive. Their members collected grapefruit in vast quantities, brought them down to a big woolshed, and sorted and packed them for shipping to orphanages and old folks homes in the South Island, where the climate is too cold to grow citrus. But, these days, the costs of shipping are prohibitive. So, the fruit hangs on the tree till it falls off. It lies on the ground, neglected. Piles of grapefruit on the ground are a sign of defeat. Even the most ingenious and thrifty householders can not keep up with their refusal to stop coming. When I was getting a newspaper at the local dairy, the woman ahead of me brought three kilos of sugar to the counter. As he rang up the sale, Harry, the Indian proprietor, commented, "Marmalade, eh?" For years, Max's mother used to give us jars of marmalade. We wrapped them carefully, carried them by hand onto the plane, and brought them all the way back to New York. Savoring every morsel, we eked them out so they would last till our next visit. Though I knew marmalade was made with citrus from the trees in people's gardens, I had no inkling of its place in the ongoing battle to beat the abundance. Marmalade keeps moving around in little jars. Everyone makes it and passes it along. It turns up on the table at church sales. Personality in a jar, it is as different as the women who make it. Some make a clear marmalade, with the thinnest shreds of peel in suspension. Others coarsely grind the whole fruit--the quick method--for a chunky marmalade, somewhat opaque and rough. There are solid marmalades that stand upright on the spoon--assertively. There are marmalades that weep. Mine is dark and very concentrated and almost like a citrus caramel. More an essence of marmalade, it slinks out of the jar, reluctantly, so tightly has it been packed in. Marmalade is the wine of the kitchen, with its vintners and vintages and distinctive qualities, each batch a snapshot of the season and the maker. I occasionally open the refridgerator door. There they all are, the jars lined up on the shelf, the light passing through them, each one a link to someone who compressed this overflow of citrus into a jar and to someone, maybe someone else, who set the jar moving along a path of gift exchanges. Gretchen, my painter friend, brought me a jar of chunky marmalade a few weeks back. She spotted me right away. Someone without a supply of marmalade is a valuable trading partner, for what good are gifts if they cannot be received. One night she proudly showed me a jar of candied grapefruit peel that she had made. Fat wedges of peel coated in white granules of sugar. The peel inside the sandy sugar coating was translucent and soft--the very essence of grapefruit, much of the bitterness gone. It was as if the peel had sucked the marmalade into itself. I left her house that night with a big bag of grapefruit from a neighbor's tree, whose branches reach over the fence into their garden. The grapefruit that falls on their side is more than enough for their needs, she explained. And, so I too entered a vortex of citrus. I was sucked into the challenge of its abundance. All those yellow orbs hanging from the lemon tree in my garden just called out. Citrus peel is such a luxury. Peel in New York City is a lethal blotter for dyes and fungicides and waxes. Such fruit belongs to the undertaker, for it is dead food, the supermarket the funeral home, our body its cemetery. It cannot be trusted, even for a few slivers of lemon peel. Not with all the rites of purification in the world can it be redeemed. Here citrus is clean--no fertilizers or pesticides. There was no resisting the compulsion to tackle the citrus avalanche. That night I began. Water in a big stainless steel pot simmered on the gas burner. A three-kilo bag of Chelsea white sugar and a can of Chelsea golden syrup (since 1884) on the counter, I removed the peel from nine grapefruit of various sizes, none of them huge. The fruit aside, I boiled the peel to reduce the bitterness. Leaving a mixture of peel and sugar to stand overnight, I went to sleep with the volatile oils of grapefruit in my hair. The next morning, I headed directly from my bed to the pot. Radio New Zealand filled the air. My first cup of coffee steamed on the counter. Rain was spitting and two snails kissed the glass window with the suction of grey muscle. Still in my long black nightgown and barefoot on the cork floor, I reheated the mixture just enough to loosen the syrup and lift out the peel, which I tossed in sugar. Gifts of peel are a wrinkle on the jars of marmalade. Few people bother anymore and when they do, it is candied orange rather than grapefruit peel that they make. Despite the fruit salad I made for breakfast, there was no way my body could absorb the fruit of nine grapefruits. What was to be done with all that fruit? And the syrup left in the pot. I found myself in the marmalade business. Into the pot went the chunks of grapefruit. I boiled lemon and orange peel, their fruit going in with the grapefruit. Lots of juice and sugar to bind it all, a few fresh bay leaves and sprigs of thyme. I'll take these jars--dark and syrupy and intense--back to New York with me. As I write this I am listening to a recipe on the radio for binoffle or bonoffle, which calls for boiling an unopened tin of condensed milk in a pot of water for 2 hours! An Irish recipe. Listeners are cautioned. Be sure the can is covered with water at all times so it does not explode. The dish is later assembled with 150 grams of butter, 2 bananas, and a package of digestive biscuits. I talk to Lina morning and night each day. When I tell her how happy I am here, she says, "Max must be so pleased that you like the land of his birth." That's it for the message in this bottle. Postscript A week after I left New Zealand, Sadie waited for Lina's daily phone call at 6:00 p.m. The call never came. Sadie rushed over to Lina's flat. There on the living room floor was Lina, felled by a massive brain hemorrhage. She lay in a pool of vomit. The impact of the fall had knocked her false teeth from her mouth. They rested a few feet away. Lina died a few hours later in the hospital without regaining consciousness. This was the swift death she wanted. She would be ready for it, whenever it arrived. From time to time, she would sit quietly in the funeral home. Three months later, my youngest sister Annie, the person to whom I was sending these messages electronically, fell into a deep coma. Defeated by breast cancer at the age of 42, she died in Toronto. Unwittingly, I was the designated emissary between them during the last months of their lives. These are the messages I transmitted. Both loved to cook and were endlessly fascinated by conversations about food. While Annie was dying, Max was in New Zealand putting Lina's flat in order. Lina communicated with him after her death, first in New York and then in Auckland. A few days after she died, Max found a brand new playing card, a three of spades, outside our front door on the Bowery. This was her ultimate trump card, taken from the games of whist we used to play, a sign that she had passed to the other side. On his return to New Zealand, several months later, Max could feel her presence in the flat. She returned every night. Max woke up just after midnight, with a very strong feeling, took a flashlight and searched each room. He did not find her, but he told her to calm down. "Everything is O.K.," he reassured her. The next morning, he told Yvonne, "Lina's in the flat. She came during the night." Yvonne replied, "She's very angry." "Yes," Max confirmed. Yvonne went on, "She's really angry you're doing the laundry. That's her job." Through her window Yvonne could see Lina's laundry line and would read it for indications that Lina was alright. Two or three days later, when Max returned to the flat after a heavy rain, he found the laundry dry and neatly folded, on a ledge near the front door. Lina had been there. I sent a fax to Max, as Annie lay in a coma, asking him to bring the plastic bag of Lina's recipes to me. I wanted to include them in this tribute, which I revised at Annie's bedside in the Intensive Care Unit of the hospital. Lina's Delicious Pudding Cream 1 cup sugar with 1 tbsp butter. Add 2 tbsp flour and the juice and grated rind of 1 large or 2 small lemons. Add 1 cup milk and two beaten yolks. Fold in stiffly beaten whites of 2 eggs. Pour batter into a deep dish. Set dish in a pan of hot water. Bake slowly (300 degrees fahrenheit) for 3/4 hour. Serve warm, but not hot. Serves 4. Muriel's Fish Casserole Cut 250-300 grams fresh fish fillets into large chunks and place in casserole. In a saucepan, mix 3 tbsp soup powder (mushroom, chicken, or asparagus) and 3/4 cup milk and simmer till thickened. Add 1 tbsp sherry and 2 tbsp chopped parsley. Pour sauce over fish. Cover casserole and bake at 300 degrees fahrenheit for 20 minutes. Serves 3-4. Rock Cakes Rub 1/4 lb butter (at room temperature) into 1 cup flour with your fingers. Add 3 tbsp sugar, 2 tsp. baking powder, 2 tbsp currants, and 1 tbsp chopped candied peel. Dampen with a beaten egg (optional) and enough milk to make a stiff dough. Break off pieces with a fork to form rough "rocks." Place onto a greased cookie sheet. Bake 10-12 minutes at 400 degrees fahrenheit. Scones Sift together 2 1/2 cups flour, 1 tsp soda, 2 tsp cream of tartar, 1/2 tsp salt. Rub in 2 tbsp butter. Add just enough milk or cream going begging (about 2/3 cup) till it pulls away from the sides of the bowl and forms a ball. Knead lightly on a barely floured board. Handle as little as possible. Form half the dough into a sheet 1/2" thick. Cut into rounds with the rim of a floured tea cup. Bake on an ungreased cookie sheet for 10-15 minutes at 425 degrees fahrenheit. Best served warm, with sweet butter, and tea. For dessert scones add raisins and sprinkle scones lightly with sugar before baking. Reserve the remaining half of the dough for pizza, which will bake in the same oven at the same time. New Zealand Pizza Press the reserved scone dough into a pie tin. Cover it with a layer of tinned spaghetti, a finely chopped onion, a tin of creamed corn (optional), slices of fresh tomato, grated sharp cheddar cheese, and slices of side and back bacon. Bake at 425 degrees fahrenheit for about 30 minutes, or until the pizza bubbles. Serves 4. Dora's Marmalade Wash and quarter 12 Poorman's Oranges and 6 large lemons. (If American citrus, use 12 oranges, 6 grapefruits, and 6 lemons.) After removing the seeds, slice the fruit finely. Place fruit and 6 quarts water in a large pan and let stand 24 hours. Bring to a boil, stirring occasionally, for 2 hours. Let stand overnight. Next day, bring to a boil and add 6 lbs of sugar. Stir well until sugar is dissolved. Boil hard for 10 minutes. Add another 6 lbs of sugar. Boil 20 minutes. Stir well to prevent scorching. Simmer, stirring, until the marmalade sets when dribbled onto a cold saucer. It is ready when it wrinkles as the saucer is tipped. I like to add bay leaves and sprigs of thyme and rosemary to the marmalade.