Rosie McGlade falls in love with Tarset Valley Marmalade, and its maker, and her husband, and their house, and Ranulph Fiennes …
On one of the sunniest days of the year, in one of the truly loveliest homes in Northumberland, Charlotte Lloyd is making marmalade in a family kitchen graced with stunning views of rolling Hesleyside, near Bellingham, white Aga with rows of sugar bags gently warming on top, open access to a sunhouse floor-to-ceiling in fig and geranium plants, lovely furniture and interesting things all around.
Have we stumbled upon the perfect life?
Always the same marmalade, Seville orange with a few lemons thrown in. Seville is the classic and everyone’s favourite when made right, something Charlotte, who’s been doing this three times a week for roughly 23 years, should know.
Always, an average, family-size jam pan (I think mine’s bigger), just a batch at a time, from Spanish oranges snaffled up in the two-week February window they’re available, and washed, weighed, and bagged with the right number of lemons to freeze. There are three big freezers full of them in a store house.
The adventurer Ranulph Fiennes is one of Tarset’s biggest fans, a close friend of Charlotte’s and her High Sheriff of Northumberland husband Peter, with whom he shared many years in the army and expeditions to the source of the Nile and such hard-to-imagine places. Each time they meet he requests a dozen jars. Several years ago, he chopped off the ends of his own fingers on returning with frostbite from the Arctic, Peter tells us.
It’s like we’ve arrived in paradise; the beautiful stone farmhouse and its courtyard heavy with climbing roses, the welcome we get, the stories, the waft of marmalade everywhere (mmm, marmalade, did anything ever smell this good…).
That’s marmalade for you. Although, that’s the first time I’ve ever thought such a thing. That’s because there’s marmalade, and there’s marmalade. Even the word seems more lovely on returning from Hesleyside, but Tarset Valley is very good indeed, dark, sticky – almost runny, the perfect meeting of bitter and sweet.
“I still have it every morning and every teatime,” Peter Lloyd told us. “We never get sick of it.”
A keen family cook (the couple have four children and four grandchildren), Charlotte’s business was borne of a request from friend Mark Robson of the Northumberland Cheese Company, then based near Rothbury, who wanted a batch making up he could sell.
She used an old family recipe, and people went wild for it. It’s a more professional look these days, but still the same process.
Peter’s palette, in case you might doubt it, comes with the reassurance that he has worked for leading wine merchants Corney & Barrow for many years, though now part time. He’s also a retired farmer, spends three days a week down south in his capacity as chairman of the Order of St John Care Trust, visiting the charity’s 78 care homes, and reckons that when back up here he must be photographed eight times a week as Northumberland’s 677th High Sheriff, a one-year role he’s clearly committed to, particularly his dealings with youth groups and disaffected young teenagers.
Anyhow, one of the wines he’s responsible for is Chateau Petrus, which will set you back £3,775 for a case of three bottles. But that’s only if you’re a well-established, high-spending customer of theirs in the first place, and even then, there’s no guarantee. Demand is too enormous for outsiders to muscle in, particularly from clients in Hong Kong and China.
“I’ve only ever bought one case, which I sold five years later and made enough money to pay for my daughter’s wedding,” Peter tells us.
Back to the marmalade.
“Each batch is made up of about 10% lemons, because I think lemons really bring out the tang of the bitter oranges,” Charlotte says. “Then I add some black treacle, or molasses, to give a lovely, caramelly depth. All the water we use is spring water, from our own spring.” The oranges boil and then sit in it for two hours, which the Lloyds believe makes all the difference, as the Scots do with their whisky.
Charlotte offers us a glass; it’s lovely, as far as water can be. There’s a definite absence of chemical, you can taste that, having run off the hill into their collecting tank, through the sandstone or whatever it does, then simply left to settle. Another reason the marmalade has won covetable plaudits like the Daily Mail Taste Test is quite possibly the fact that it is made in such small batches. Charlotte adds the warmed sugar bag by bag.
“Then I’ve got this marvellous gadget, a refractometer, which you dip in, hold up to the light, and it tells you the exact sugar content, which I set at 65%. I’ve heard strawberry farmers use them, helping them to get 70% sugar content in their fruit.”
Her biggest customer? The Northumberland Sausage Company, where they turn it into award-winning red onion and marmalade sausages.
Perfect on toast or soft white bread and butter, Charlotte also puts a dollop of marmalade into apple tarts and crumbles, which she says makes all the difference. She smears her hams with it at Christmas before adding brown sugar and mustard, and says it’s wonderful in milk puddings.
Marmalade never tasted so good. Tarset Valley Marmalade outlets include Corbridge Larder, Brocksbushes in Corbridge, and Blagdon Farm Shop.
