Sugars, pectin and acids are the basic ingredients to prepare canned fruits, vegetables and flowers.
For the English, a marmalade is a preparation of citrus fruits with sugar; a jam, the sweetened concoction of other fruits. In Spain, the semantic profiles of one and the other are more confused. In popular parlance, jams include pieces of fruit, but jams do not. But, strictly speaking, the difference lies in the preparation: in the jam, the fruit is cooked with syrup and in the jam, a macerated mixture of fruit and sugar is cooked. Food regulations describe the jam as a mixture, with the appropriate gelled consistency, of sugars and pulp, fruit puree or both, whose soluble dry matter content (equivalent to the sugar content) is equal to or greater than 60%. For its part, jam is defined as a product prepared by cooking fruit to which sugars have been incorporated until a semi-liquid or thick consistency is achieved, whose soluble dry matter content must be between 40 and 60%. Thus, the sugar content is the factor that defines the border between preserves and marmalades.
In the opinion of Georgina Regàs, from the Museo de la Confitura del Torrent in Gerona, the process of obtaining both preserves is practically the same. We will follow your criteria and use jam or marmalade indistinctly
