Dundee Marmalade: Keiller's, Seville Oranges and a Shipwreck Legend

Each major claim carries one of three labels. established means supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources. shared means the core fact is sound but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation. traditional means widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

The founding of Keiller's is documented. The Spanish ship story appears in later company histories and has no contemporary record. Historians of food, notably C. Anne Wilson, have traced marmalade's earlier history.

The folklorist F. Marian McNeill, in The Scots Kitchen (1929; revised 1963), gives the fullest popular version of the Dundee story. Her account is valuable as a record of what Scots believed in her time, but it repeats the ship legend and adds a second, earlier Janet Keiller. Where her account goes beyond the documentary record, it is labelled traditional below.

Alan Davidson's The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, ed. Tom Jaine, 2014) has an unsigned entry on marmalade, so by Davidson, which summarises Wilson's history. It is a careful reference source and declines to endorse the Scottish claim outright, so where it is used for that question the claim is labelled shared.

A word from Portugal

established The word marmalade comes from the Portuguese marmelada, a firm paste made from quinces (marmelo). It was imported into Britain from the fifteenth century. Over time, cooks made similar preserves from other fruits, including oranges. Recipes for orange marmalade appear in English manuscripts of the seventeenth century.

established The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014), drawing on C. Anne Wilson's The Book of Marmalade, fills in the early stages. Portuguese marmelada had reached Britain by the late 15th century, where it was used as a medicine or a sweetmeat. A clear version was called cotignac in France and quiddony in England, and recipes for quiddonies and thick quince marmalades are frequent in English cookery books of the 16th and 17th centuries. Lemons and bitter oranges, also imported, were pulped into stiff conserves, sometimes with apple, and by analogy were also called marmalades. So were preserves of damsons, apples, pears and peaches. All of these were set in wooden boxes or moulded into shapes and cut into slices for the dessert or banquet course. They were eaten from the fingers, "not at all like modern marmalade".

Confection or breakfast spread?

shared McNeill accepted that orange marmalade appears in "one or two fairly old cookery-books", but argued that these were confections, usually mixed with apples or other fruit, and "differing in kind from our breakfast marmalade". Food historians agree that early marmalades were firm pastes eaten as sweetmeats, and that the looser, peel-filled preserve eaten on toast is a later development. Whether that change happened first in Scotland is plausible but not proven, so her description of marmalade as "a Scottish invention" should be read as a claim about the breakfast style, not the preserve itself.

shared The Oxford Companion to Food reaches much the same verdict. The 18th century, it says, produced a new kind of marmalade, a transparent jelly containing a little finely cut peel and the forerunner of the modern product. It records a "strong traditional belief" that Scotland was responsible, and admits that some of the supporting tales "tax credibility". Its evidence is more concrete: in England marmalade was still treated as a dessert, but Scottish recipes of the mid-18th century used a higher proportion of water, giving a spreadable consistency, and marmalade appears to have been a breakfast spread in Scotland much earlier than in England. This supports a Scottish role in the breakfast preserve without proving that Scotland invented it.

established What is well attested is the Scottish breakfast habit. Bishop Pococke, touring in 1760, found "preserved orange peel" on the table alongside honey and currant jelly, and McNeill quotes an old-time tourist describing "a bitter-sweet but most delightful compound of orange skins and juices, called marmalade, which we never see in England". By the time of Galt's novels it was still, in his words as quoted by McNeill, "a curiosity among the English". McNeill pairs marmalade with porridge as "Scotland's chief gifts to the breakfast-table of the English-speaking world".

established Samuel Johnson, no friend to Scottish pretensions, conceded the point in A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775): "In the breakfast the Scots, whether of the Lowlands or mountains, must be confessed to excel us. The tea and coffee are accompanied not only with butter, but with honey, conserves, and marmalades." He added that an epicure who could travel by wishing "would breakfast in Scotland". The Oxford Companion to Food quotes the passage in its entry on Scotland.

established The breakfast habit may be older than the orange version. The food historian Annette Hope, in A Caledonian Feast (1987), drawing on Rosalind Marshall's study of the Hamilton family papers, lists marmalade among the breakfast foods at Hamilton Palace in the late seventeenth century, alongside rolls, eggs, mutton collops and milk. It was marmalade of quinces, the older paste, but it was already being eaten at breakfast. Oranges were reaching Edinburgh too: the vintner's bill for the Countess of Southesk's stay in the summer of 1671 includes "limones & oringeres" (as quoted by Hope).

established Hope links marmalade with an older Scottish word. Elizabeth Cleland's A New and Easy Method of Cookery (Edinburgh, 1759) has recipes for "Quiddany of Pipins, of an Amber or Ruby Colour" and "Quiddany of all Sorts of Plumbs": apple or plum liquor boiled with sugar to "a quaking Jelly" and turned out of moulds. Quiddany, like marmalade, took its name from the quince, though Cleland's contain none. Hope also cites the American food writer Waverley Root for a British cookbook of 1669 with several marmalade recipes, mostly of quince and none of oranges. That is one book, and does not contradict the English orange marmalades found in manuscripts of the period.

established The Edinburgh cookery books of the later eighteenth century carry recipes. McNeill names Mrs Hannah Robertson's The Ladies' School of Arts, Mrs Cleland and Mrs McIver. The recipe she reprints is Meg Dods's "Scots Orange-Chip Marmalade" (1826): equal weights of Seville oranges and loaf sugar, the boiled skins scraped and cut into narrow chips, with lemon added late. She also notes the older Scottish custom of serving marmalade with roast pork, duck, goose and boiled ham.

"Marie malade"

traditional A popular story claims marmalade was named after Mary Queen of Scots: when she was seasick or ill, her French attendants prepared orange preserves for "Marie malade", sick Mary. The story is a folk etymology. The word was in use in English before Mary was born.

The Keillers

established In 1797 Janet Keiller and her son James began producing marmalade commercially in Dundee. Their marmalade, which included thin shreds of peel, was a success, and the business grew into a major firm. Keiller's marmalade was sold across Britain and the Empire, packed in distinctive white stoneware jars. The firm also made confectionery and, later, other preserves and cakes.

established W. M. Mathew's history of the firm, as summarised by Carol Foreman in Made in Scotland (2nd edn, 2010), corrects the popular picture. Janet Keiller was James's mother, and her husband John was a tailor. Their business was a small confectionery shop on the south side of the Seagate, making cakes, jams, jellies and sweets, which James joined at 22. His contribution, dated to 1797, was a thinner "chip" marmalade of sliced peel in a jelly, in place of the dense paste of grated peel then usual. It was not a big seller in his lifetime: a stock-take of March 1833 valued the firm's marmalade at £27 out of total stock worth £536. James died in 1839, aged 63. His widow, Margaret, and their son Alexander moved the business to Castle Street in 1840, and with peel-cutting machines and steam power marmalade became the main product by 1867. Around 1857 Alexander opened a factory on Guernsey, where sugar was free of the high mainland duty, and when the British trade-mark register opened in 1876, "Keiller's Dundee Orange Marmalade" was among the first marks entered.

established Foreman follows the later firm. John Keiller, Alexander's son, moved the second factory from Guernsey to Silvertown in London in 1888, after the sugar duties ended, and expanded the confectionery side. He was the last of the family in the business and died in 1899. Fires destroyed Keiller works in Dundee in 1860 and 1900, and in London in 1899; the London factory was bombed in the Blitz. In Dundee the firm worked from Albert Square and, after the Second World War, a new preserves factory at Maryfield.

The Spanish ship

traditional The best-known story about the Keillers says that James bought a cargo of bitter Seville oranges cheaply from a Spanish ship sheltering from a storm in Dundee harbour, and his mother made them into marmalade. The story appears in later accounts and company publicity, but there is no contemporary evidence for it.

traditional McNeill's version, printed in 1929 and kept in 1963, differs in a telling way. She credits the invention to an earlier Janet Keiller, "née Pierson", whose marriage to a James Keiller on 1 April 1700 she says is in the Dundee register. In her telling it is this James who buys the storm-delayed Spanish oranges and this Janet who boils them. The Janet of 1797, née Mathewson, is in her account a descendant's wife who, by coincidence, shared the name and founded the factory with her son. No documentary evidence connects an eighteenth-century Keiller marriage to marmalade, and the doubling looks like an attempt to give the 1797 firm an older origin. She does not repeat the "Marie malade" story; she derives the word correctly from the Portuguese for quince.

shared Annette Hope (1987) gives a third date. She wonders whether Janet Keiller called her orange marmalade a "quiddany" in 1770, and credits her with the inspiration for "millions of breakfast-tables today". She gives no source for 1770, and W. M. Mathew's history of the firm dates James Keiller's marmalade to 1797. The 1770 date is best treated as one more sign of how unsettled the story was before Mathew.

After Keiller

shared McNeill traces the spread of the preserve. A Paisley grocer named Robertson and his wife, she writes, set out to soften its bitterness, produced a clear jelly with fine shreds of peel, and so created "Golden Shred"; she dates this to 1859, though other accounts give a later date. She was told that about 1870 an Oxford don brought a recipe from a Perthshire manse to Mrs Cooper, a grocer's wife, whose pots became the undergraduates' "squish" and the start of Oxford marmalade. By her second edition she could add Baxter's of Fochabers, who were maturing a "Vintage" marmalade in whisky casks.

traditional Robertson's own story, as given by Carol Foreman from company sources, is a Paisley version of the Keiller legend. James Robertson (born 1832), a former thread-mill worker, opened a grocer's shop at 86 Causeyside, Paisley, in 1859. In 1864, the story goes, he took pity on a struggling salesman and bought a barrel of bitter oranges that would not sell; his wife, Marion, made them into a clear marmalade with shreds of peel, and she named it "Golden Shred" after holding a jar up to the window. The dates explain McNeill's 1859, which is the year the shop opened. No contemporary record of the barrel or the naming has been found.

established The firm's growth is better documented. The Robertsons first used part of a Paisley cloth-finishing works at Thrushgrove, heating their pans with its surplus steam, then built a factory in Stevenson Street in 1880. Factories followed at Droylsden near Manchester (1890), Catford in London (1900) and Brislington in Bristol (1914). The Paisley factory closed in 1979, and the firm passed to the Avana group in 1981 and to Rank Hovis McDougall in 1987. From 1910 Robertson's used a golly figure as its trademark. It was a racist caricature, long criticised, and the company withdrew it in 2001–02.

established The word kept a wider meaning for a long time. The Oxford Companion to Food points out that thick quince marmalades still appeared in recipe books well into the 19th century, and quotes Mrs Beeton (1861), for whom marmalades and jams "differ little from each other". She reserved "marmalade" for preserves of the firmer fruits, such as pineapples or orange rinds, and called fruit pastes "a kind of marmalade".

established The Companion explains how marmalade became an industrial product. In the later 19th century sugar became much cheaper and jam-making grew into a large industry, with bread and jam a cheap food for working people. Marmalade gained because jam factories could make it in winter, from imported Seville oranges, at little more cost than summer jams from home-grown fruit. It kept a more luxurious image than jam and was exported to breakfast tables across the Empire, with recipes following. The trade names "golden shred" for orange and "silver shred" for lemon describe slivers of peel in a clear jelly, the style McNeill credits to Robertson's.

Legacy

established Keiller's helped make marmalade a British breakfast staple and made Dundee synonymous with it. The firm later became part of larger food companies, combining with Crosse & Blackwell, which was in turn bought by Nestlé in 1960, and production eventually left the city.

shared The date of the Crosse & Blackwell merger is given as 1920 by Grace's Guide; Foreman says Keiller's merged with Crosse & Blackwell and Lazenby's in 1919, with Crosse & Blackwell taking full control in 1922. In her account the 1980s brought a quick succession of owners. Nestlé sold Keiller's to the Okhai group, which sold it to Barker & Dobson, whose preserves business went to Rank Hovis McDougall. RHM moved marmalade-making from Maryfield to Robertson's plant in Manchester, keeping the Keiller name and white jars. The Maryfield factory, by then making sweets, closed in 1992 when its owner went into receivership, ending 195 years of Keiller production in Dundee. Writing in 2010, Foreman notes that Keiller's marmalade was sold in England and abroad but not in Scotland.

shared The firm's off-season work may also explain another Dundee speciality. The Oxford Companion to Food reports, from sources in the city, that Keiller's made Dundee cake in the months when it was not making marmalade and may have had spare peel. This is local tradition, not documented company practice. Dundee still celebrates the connection, and Keiller jars appear in museums and antique shops.

• The word marmalade comes from Portuguese for quince paste.
• Keiller's was founded in Dundee in 1797.
• Keiller's jars were white stoneware.
• The "Marie malade" story is a myth.
• Dundee was known for jute, jam and journalism.
• Oxford undergraduates called marmalade "squish".
• McNeill was offered marmalade by a French hostess with the words "Voulez-vous du Dundi?"
• Early "marmalades" were firm enough to be cut into slices and eaten with the fingers.
• Samuel Johnson admitted that the Scots beat the English at breakfast.
• The Oxford Companion to Food notes that marmalade-making is one kitchen job in British homes quite often done by men.
• In 1833 the Keillers' marmalade was worth only £27 of the £536 in stock in their shop.
• Keiller's made marmalade on Guernsey from about 1857 to escape the sugar duty on the mainland.
• Robertson's first heated its preserving pans with spare steam from a Paisley cloth-finishing works.

• Myth: Marmalade was invented in Dundee. The word comes from the Portuguese marmelada, a quince paste, and orange marmalade recipes existed in English manuscripts of the seventeenth century. Scotland's part in the spreadable breakfast marmalade is plausible but not proven; Keiller's made Dundee famous for it.
• Myth: "Marmalade" comes from "Marie malade", for Mary Queen of Scots. This is a folk etymology. The word was in use in English before Mary was born.
• Myth: James Keiller bought a Spanish ship's cargo of Seville oranges and his mother made them into marmalade. It is a family legend with no contemporary evidence.
• Disputed: When and by whom the Keiller marmalade was invented. F. Marian McNeill credits an earlier Janet Keiller, "née Pierson", married in 1700, but no documentary evidence connects her to marmalade. Annette Hope wonders about 1770, with no source, while the firm's historian W. M. Mathew dates James Keiller's marmalade to 1797.
• Myth: Janet and James Keiller were a married couple who set up a marmalade factory in 1797. They were mother and son, running a small confectionery shop. In 1833 marmalade made up only £27 of the shop's £536 stock, and it became the main product by 1867.
• Disputed: Robertson's "Golden Shred" story. The company's account is that James Robertson bought a barrel of unsold bitter oranges in 1864 and his wife Marion made and named the marmalade. No contemporary record of the barrel or the naming has been found, and McNeill dates it to 1859, the year the shop opened.
• Disputed: When Keiller's merged with Crosse & Blackwell. Grace's Guide gives 1920. Carol Foreman gives 1919, with Crosse & Blackwell taking full control in 1922.
• Myth: The marmalade eaten at Hamilton Palace in the late seventeenth century was orange marmalade. It was marmalade of quinces, the older paste, though already eaten at breakfast.