Recipe for Persian-style Three-fruit Marmalade with Cardamom

I think I just achieved the right tweak on a marmalade that I first encountered eight or ten years ago when a friend on the site You Grow Girl emailed me one of her family recipes. She's Persian, and this is a Persian-style marmalade (she tells me) in that it uses Seville oranges with lime and cardamom. The recipe she sent me was a little heavy on the peel, and I found the lime gave it a kind of sulky taste, so I've played with the fruit and sugar combinations, and I think I've now got a winner.

Persian-style Three-fruit Marmalade with Cardamom

Ingredients

• 6 Seville oranges
• 3 lemons
• 5 limes
• 10 cardamom pods
• 2 pounds (= 4 cups) of sugar
• Water

Instructions

1. Sterilize snap-rim jars. (This small-batch recipe yields about 4 pints, which is 4 cups or 1 litre.) If you've never tried hot-water bath canning before, read these instructions for sterilizing jars and processing preserves. My recipe for raspberry jam also has more detailed instructions for beginners.
2. Scrub the citrus fruit in warm water to remove any wax, pesticides or dirt.
3. Cut fruits in half and squeeze the juice into a bowl through a sieve. Discard the half-limes, but with the oranges and lemons, use a spoon to scoop out the flesh, fibres and pith. Collect any extra juice through the sieve.
4. Put all the orange and lemon pith, flesh and seeds into a jelly bag. Squeeze it to extract any remaining juice.
5. Cut the orange and lemon peels into very thin matchsticks and set them in a pot of water to boil until they are tender (about an hour).
6. Crack open the cardamom pods on the counter by pressing down with the ball of your hand on the flat of a knife blade. Remove the dark seeds and reserve them.
7. When the peel is ready, pour it into a strainer or colander to drain away the water.
8. Combine the sugar and orange / lemon / lime juice in a thick-bottomed pot. Add the jelly bag full of pith and seeds (I clip the neck of the bag to the handle of my pot.) Bring the mixture to a boil, stirring watchfully to make sure the sugar dissolves and doesn't burn.
9. Squeeze the jelly bag against the side of the pot to remove any last juice and pectin; remove it, then add the orange / lemon peel and the cardamom.
10. Bring it to a gentle boil, stirring more or less constantly until the peel is transparent and the mixture has reached the gelling point. Be careful not to let it boil over or burn.
11. Using a funnel, ladle into sterilized pint jars, leaving about a quarter-inch of head room, add lids and bands and process for ten minutes in boiling water.