A bag of cumquats
Today my neighbour presented me with a big bag of cumquats - 2 1/2 kilo he said. Cumquat trees are small trees but they seem to yield an amazing amount of fruit - as the picture above (taken in Vietnam) attests. But what to do with them?
You might think you can only make marmalade - and I shall be making some, but on the preserving side you can also make pickles, chutneys and relishes and even a liqueur. And I think I have also made all of these at one time or another. Today we are having roast pork for dinner and so I have sliced up a few cumquats into a marinade that also has a bit of maple syrup, garlic, wine and mustard. It's a bit pot luck and I have no idea whether it will work, but theoretically it should. Pork likes sweet and sour. And I see that, rather reassuringly, Stephanie Alexander's list of Cumquats go with ... includes pork and sugar and wine vinegar. Well maple syrup and wine are sort of variations on the sugar and wine vinegar. I did consider vinegar - too late now.
For cumquats are indeed a bit sour - which, of course, is why they make good marmalade. There seem to be two types - round and oval, with the oval ones apparently being able to be eaten from the tree. But then again somebody else said they were sour on the inside. For it seems that contrary to the ordinary orange, the skin is sweet and the fruit is sour.
As you can see from these drawings, they seem to prefer drawing the oval ones. Now I have never seen an oval one. Maybe they are more common in Asia. For this is from where they originate. The name is from the Chinese, which means golden orange.
Here in Australia you don't seem to be able to buy them commercially, though there is one South Australian company which grows them and makes various things from them. Kumquatery they are called. They are friends of Maggie Beer and they have worked with her to develop some of their products I think. And the other curious thing about Maggie Beer and cumquats is that she has a section on cumquats in her Harvest book but it's in the Spring section. We are now in late Autumn, and my neighbour has just stripped his overladen tree. Maybe they are so prolific that they have two seasons in a year! Mostly here in Australia people grow their own. Almost as many people have a cumquat tree as a lemon tree (virtually everyone with a garden it seems to me). I have recently planted one and it does seem to be doing rather better than my feeble lemon trees that I wrote about a long time ago. So maybe it's an easy thing to grow.
As to cumquat versus kumquat. Well here in Australia it's mostly cumquat, though why the South Australians have called their company Kumquatery I have no idea. In England and America it's kumquat. Go figure. I suppose the Americans are a bit more unimaginative when it comes to spelling, but I don't know why the English would go for K rather than C. But Jane Grigson definitely spells it with a K.
So what to do with them? Well apart from the aforesaid marmalade, liqueur and chutney, Stephanie Alexander suggests brandying them. Which is a bit like the liqueur. Put 500 g cumquats into a large preserving jar, add 2 1/4 cups sugar and 600ml brandy and cover. Stir every few days with a clean skewer until the sugar has dissolved and then leave for a couple of months to mature. Intriguingly she has a vanilla bean in the list of ingredients but then doesn't mention it again. Do you add it to the jar? I guess so. You can then eat the cumquats - now considerably sweeter or use them in various desserts.
She also has a recipe for cumquat butter which you put under the skin of chicken. But first you have to pickle the cumquats. For this is the thing. Mostly the recipes using cumquats are not actually for cumquats themselves, but for cumquat marmalade, cumquat pickle, cumquat chutney ... Delia doesn't mention them at all and neither do many of my other favourite cooks so a bit of a specialist taste really.
But there are lots of lovely paintings on the web - mostly with Chines vases and bowls. Here are some of them.
Now that I think about it I don't think I had ever come across cumquats before I came to Australia. And certainly Jane Grigson barely mentions them.
Anyway - tomorrow i'm making cumquat marmalade from these beautiful little things. It's much easier than making Seville Orange marmalade. And another bit of good timing - I've run out of space to store all my empty jam jars.
