this is my cumquat marmalade. one of the two remaining jars from the batch i made back in october last year, as part of my project of endurance and then subsequent theorising.

when i made the marmalade the last step in the process was make labels for it. which i did do, eventually, with an alphabet stamp set and white stickers. this label isn’t one i made. instead, it’s my official entry label for my marmalade into the newcastle show.

labels have different forms, different purposes, and carry different information. this was the first time i’ve entered anything into a show competition (other than the bumpy pottery i entered as an 8 year old to the mt gambier show), and i was definitely a novice. i had no idea what the class or cat numbers were – eventually i worked out the class was the number of the section i’d entered (’101 – any other citrus marmalade’) but i’m still at a loss on the cat.

instead of the label carrying meaning and giving the container and its contents an identity, this label anonymised it all. like a brown bag in a wine tasting, suddenly my marmalade was just that – preserved cumquats in a jar, to be assessed against other similar preserves.

or so i thought.

i wanted my marmalade to be judged, i wanted this process of preservation to take a path through to a point that i could mark as final.

but instead, as you watch this video, you’ll see that actually the container and the preservation process were just as important as the final product. i was eliminated (i like to claim disqualified) because the jar i’d used hadn’t had all of the previous label residue removed. we’re not talking old scrappy bits of paper here. i think it was about a 2mm square bit of glue on one side. i still need to think about what’s going on. the residue wasn’t going to damage the contents of the jar, but maybe it did indicate a lack of attention to cleanliness or detail when making the preserves.

the second comment on my marmalade was the presence of bubbles. boy were there bubbles, and i realised i wasn’t in the running at all when i pulled the jar out of my calico bag that i’d had slung over my should on the 15 minute, heat of the day walk to the showground. the jar in the photo above is the jar i entered. but by the time i got to the show it had a whole lot of frothy little bubbles along the sides. i described it as akin to a marmalade cappucino, all frothy and need to settle. which it didn’t do by the time judging came along. the judge (whose name escapes me, but she’d been judging for 17 years and was from the new england region of nsw) had given a spiel about bubbles and how they appear if you stir the jam after you’ve take it off the boil, before you pour it in. and she shared some pouring techniques. my bubbles weren’t because of this, but i took note still. this is about transportation and movement of contained and preserved things. a reminder that the container (whether it be a building, a box or a mind) is never going to always preserve the contents. there’s always a risk of damage, or change, or transformation. the actual marmalade wasn’t affected though. i took the jar back to jane’s with me after judging and she’s been giving it first prize every morning as she eats it on toast.

and thirdly, the judge comments that my marmalade isn’t as bitter as she would expect a cumquat marmalade to be. then she gives a mini lecture about a different type of cumqaut (‘”nagami” – i always remember it by thinking of origami’). which implies a set notion of what marmalade should be, and what we expect the outcome of the preservation process to be. i did all the right things, followed all the right processes, but started with something that wasn’t quite right; was an exotic, or imported product that changed the way the preservation process worked. made the marmalade sweet instead of bitter.