His team also took Kendal Mint Cake up Everest:

> Sir Edmund Hillary and his team carried Romney's Kendal Mint Cake with them on the first successful ascent of Mount Everest in 1953. The packaging currently includes the following: “'We sat on the snow and looked at the country far below us … we nibbled Kendal Mint Cake.' A member of the successful Everest expedition wrote – 'It was easily the most popular item on our high altitude ration – our only criticism was that we did not have enough of it.'”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kendal_Mint_Cake

Imagine a Peppermint Pattie, but intensified by an order of magnitude.

I didn’t know that and I don’t think we were taught that detail. He was from New Zealand and ‘we count that’ as some say. The teachers probably stressed the British expedition part of the truth.

I can’t stand Seville orange marmalade but lime marmalade is good.

Hillary also really pissed off the British explorer Fuchs on the Trans-Antarctic Expedition by racing ahead to the South Pole when he was only supposed to be laying out food caches. [1]

But here in NZ, we kinda like the fact that he stuck it to the British. We even have one of his modified tractors in the Canterbury Museum.

Another random factoid - part of Hillary's team was Peter Mulgrew, who died in the Erebus disaster[2] having replaced Hillary as the tour guide at the last minute.

[1]: https://nzhistory.govt.nz/page/hillary-reaches-south-pole

[2]: https://nzhistory.govt.nz/culture/erebus-disaster

Aussie here. Home made seville orange marmalade is the good stuff. Everything else is just gross orange sugar goop. If I wanted to spread flavoured sucrose onto my bread, there are much more appealing options like blackberry.

(And don't get me started about lime. Lime is the most overrated citrus.)

Where can you buy Seville orange marmalade in Aus? The cheap marmalade you buy from Coles is like gelatin + sugar with some orange food coloring.

Nowhere. I have to make it myself or wait for my mum to produce a new batch. She has so much interest that she makes 20–30 jars at a time.

My mum emigrated to Gold Coast decades ago - still makes great marmalade in her 80s!

(Disclaimer: I'm not British nor a native speaker and have no interest in claiming one side or the other)

When Edmund Hillary was born in Auckland (in 1919), New Zealdn was not yet independent, but a "Dominion" of the British Empire.

What would even be the best demonym to refer to anyone born in that dominion?

New Zealander or Kiwi. Our sense of being a nation distinct from "Home" as Britain was called really took off after World War One.

While we weren't technically independent, we'd been self-governing since 1865, although it took us a lot longer to cut all of the apron strings, and well, the Queen is still our head of state, so who knows if or when we'll go full republic - most NZers don't really care. But hey, in the 2000s we stopped using the Privy Council in England as our highest court.

http://www.firstworldwar.tki.org.nz/assets/Uploads/Images/Y5...

According to a gov.nz site

"In 1948 New Zealanders became New Zealand citizens – before that they had been British citizens."

So Hillary would have been a British citizen most of his life and possibly acquired a liking for marmalade while in that state.

To add to that it was only a few years earlier, 1947 (vs 1953) that NZ ratified the law allowing their further independence from Britain. Wikipedia claims that into the 70s many in NZ considered themselves to be part of a British colony.

Also the expedition was the "British Mount Everest expedition". I think it's fair to include marmalade being in Hillary's supplies as being indicative of British cultural adoration of marmalade. Hillary's grandparents were from Yorkshire, UK.

Apparently Hillary, as his father and brother, was a beekeeper; I wonder if he took honey too.

Well as someone from The Commonwealth, he was Brit-ish.