For an evening of cultural contrasts, it would be hard to beat a reception at the Embassy of Japan (an ex-gentleman’s club) to celebrate marmalade. Batting for Japan, the Japanese Ambassador and his wife, charming, cultured and conversational as one might expect, and the bouncy, enthusiastic mayor of Yawatahama City. For the Brits, the eccentric and delightful Hasell-McCosh family, led by Jane Hasell-McCosh whose brainchild was the World Original Marmalade Festival held annually at Dalemain, her home in Cumbria. She was backed up by daughter Hermione, a professional photographer, artist daughter Bea whose painting of Koi Carp made an ideal gift for the Ambassador, and son George, a dab hand on the bagpipes. They have handy skills, as you see. The reason for being there is that, astonishingly, this was the announcement of the first Japanese Marmalade Festival planned for May 2019 in Yawatahama City.
Why Japan?
“What?!!” I hear you say – “I didn’t know marmalade was Japanese!” Well it’s not, it’s peculiarly British, the result of a long trading relationship with Portugal and Southern Spain going back at least to the 12th century, our access to copious quantities of sugar from the West Indies in the 17th century and industrialisation in the 19th. The oranges (bitter Seville Oranges for the purist) came from Spain, the sugar allowed us to create a preserve that lasted for months and the mass production invented by Victorian food processors like the Keillor family in Scotland allowed it to be provided cheaply to the burgeoning urban populations of industrial Britain and the wider Empire. However, Japan has one massive advantage in the marmalade game, while we import our ingredients, they grow nearly 200 different types of citrus fruits and many of them make excellent marmalades, yuzu being perhaps the stand-out candidate. And, yes, Yawatahama City is the centre of Japan’s citrus growing region.
The Marmalade Festival’s most loyal sponsor is the Piccadilly department store, Fortnum & Mason, another shop with its own long heritage and supremely popular with Japanese visitors. Add to that the Japanese love of craft and beauty and you will understand why one of 2017’s winners at the Marmalade Festival was an exquisite yuzu marmalade with lime, a jar of vivid orange jelly contrasting with suspended green peel painstakingly cut into tiny heart shapes. Should you venture into Cumbria in March don’t be surprised to find Japanese couples swathed in overcoats all on their way to Dalemain for the Marmalade Festival, after all, Jane Hasell-McCosh is a regular on Japanese television these days and there will be a surprising number of Japanese marmalades to try in the Tasting Barn. The connections are growing.
But back to the Japanese Embassy reception. The Embassy is in Piccadilly, one of those grand Victorian buildings with windows overlooking the park.
Japan joins the Club
The vast reception room cries out for a ball but it turns out that it was designed as the Smoking Room of a gentleman’s club. When the Constitutional Club overflowed with Conservative members in the heyday of Victorian club life in the 1890s, the Junior Constitutional Club was formed to pick up the slack and premises were built for new members at 101 Piccadilly by a pupil of Anthony Salvin, Colonel Robert Edis (his Spy cartoon portrait from Vanity Fair in 1885 is left). It’s a handsome building among many along Piccadilly, remarkable only because Historic England cite it as the first building in London to be entirely faced in marble. Somehow it seems to have been built on the wrong scale for a Japanese Embassy. The type of heavy classical architecture favoured by 19th century gentlemen overpowers the brushstrokes of the Japanese contemporary art that adorns the walls.
The first Japanese delegation to Britain found a home in Sussex Gardens in Bayswater but expanded its entertaining space in Grosvenor Gardens around 1897. When the 10,000 members of the Junior Constitutional Club (the largest gentleman’s club in London in 1890) began to fall away and it closed in 1904, in moved the Japanese delegation which had become a fully fledged Embassy to the Court of St James in 1905, a tribute to British support of Japan in the Russo-Japanese War.
So, in the flurry of Brexit, it is good to have a new global relationship building on the heritage of a centuries old foodstuff. Contrasts aside, the reception was a chance to celebrate the growing of beautiful fruit around the world and its use in a fine hand crafted preserve is part of a burgeoning global appreciation for artisanal food traditions which can be carried across continents. What a tribute to the energy of the Hasell-McCosh family of Dalemain that a clever idea for a country house event 14 years ago has now spawned an annual Marmalade Festival in Britain, Australia and Japan. Go and enjoy the orange groves around Yawatahama City or the fells of Cumbria soon, they have marmalade in common.
