Steamed Marmalade Pudding

January is the month the Seville oranges arrive. They turn up at the market for a few weeks, knobbly and unlovely, and then they're gone again until next year. Most of them become marmalade. A few of them should become this pudding.

A steamed sponge is an old-fashioned thing, and I know that word makes people nervous, as though it means difficult or fussy or requiring equipment you don't own. It doesn't. You need a pudding basin, some string, a saucepan with a lid, and two hours when you're going to be in the house anyway. That's all. The kitchen does most of the work. You just have to keep the water topped up and not forget it's there.

What you get at the end is worth the small trouble. A light, buttery sponge perfumed with orange zest, sitting on a pool of dark, bittersweet marmalade that has turned almost to syrup in the steam. When you turn it out, the marmalade runs down the sides and soaks into the sponge, and the whole pudding smells of January, of cold windows and hot kitchens, of the short brightness of winter citrus.

I wrote it down in the notebook the first year I made it: Seville oranges. Pudding basin. Rain. That was enough to remember it by.