We used Jane Grigson's recipe from English Cookery which is brief - so brief it's almost terse. We ran into a couple of problems as a result of that, but I'll outline them here to help poor unfortunates who stumble across this blog, so they don't repeat them. We also upscaled the recipe to make a bit more because we're gluttons*
She recommends sugar cubes, that you can rub on the outside of the lemon for extra graininess, but not being owners of a guest house or absinthe enthusiasts, we didn't have any. 600g of plain old sugar, then, and 6 lemons, given a good scrub first because they were waxed. I like to imagine that lemons are waxed with old candles the way you wax a zip on a lifejacket or somesuch, but in point of fact I know this to be untrue.
Then we zested and juiced the lemons and combined all of this with the sugar and one pack (250g) of butter - it was this which dictated our expansion of the recipe - it was all we had. It was supposed to be a bit more than that, but we decided that the small matter of 20 grams didn't matter, not between friends. We cut the butter up into chunks which then stuck together, because I didn't do it very well. This all went into a rather big pyrex bowl. It was important that the bowl was big, because next we put that over a pan of boiling (well, simmering) water, in lieu of a bain-marie. There's another reason the bowl had to be fairly sizable, and I'll come to it next paragraph.
When the butter was melted and it all mixed together fairly contentedly, we beat 9 eggs in a separate bowl, then beat them into the mixture. (for those of you keeping track from last paragraph, that's the other reason it had to be a big size). From here on in all Ms Grigson advises is "stir steadily until the mixture becomes thick."
Which is great, but we were surprised at how long that took. By now it was really looking and smelling like lemon curd. We kept stirring it and kept it hot but not boiling - it's all about cooking the egg properly. I should note as well here, just in case it wasn't clear earlier, that we put nine whole eggs in, yolk and albumen both.
It's occurred to me that saying we stirred the mixture for "aaaages" is no real help, even if I precede it with a great many intensifiers. I've discussed it with Hazel and we're in agreement we stirred it for around half an hour after the addition of eggs. It doesn't go as thick as it is when cooled, but in the next couple of photographs we've attempted to give a pictorial guide as to consistency. I'd say it was about as thick as PVA, if that's any help to you.
We'd sterilized a few jars earlier in the process by bunging them in the oven on newspaper at around 160C for, well, ages actually as we were busy stirring the confounded curd. The funnel that wasn't man enough for the marmalade did well here and by later that evening we were scoffing it down on freshly baked bread (in the breadmaker, mind, the kitchen was in too much of a state to attempt the other way.
*Hazel may not actually be a glutton
