Home › Preserving, Drying and Canning Fruit › Fruit and Jelly Press
Fruit and Jelly Press
4. Weigh the fruit, if currants without removing the stems, and allow half a pound of loaf or pure granulated sugar to each pound of fruit
5. If the fruit requires rinsing do so quickly and let the fruit dry again.
6. Use only a porcelain-lined kettle for preserving.
There is really no objection to a brass kettle but it must be thoroughly cleaned both before and after using.
7. In making jelly, pound a portion of the fruit, to get some juice for the bottom of the kettle, to prevent burning. Then add the remainder and boil freely for twenty minutes or more, stirring often enough to prevent burning. 8. Let your straining-bag be three-cornered and of strong material and long, so it may be properly twisted to get pressure. Strain the juice into a porcelain-lined pan. 9. Return the liquid to the kettle, and when it has boiled up add the sugar, previously weighed.
10. When the sugar has thoroughly dissolved, the jelly will be done, and should be put into the jelly-glasses or forms. If you have properly observed the directions, it will coagulate upon the side of the dipper as it is taken out. So there can be no doubt of the result.
11. The general rules for making jellies may be stated as follows: In making jellies of apricots, quinces, peaches, apples or plums, peel, remove the stones or cores, cut in pieces, cover with water, and boil gently until well cooked; then strain the juice gently through a jelly bag, and add a half pint of sugar to a pint of juice. For berries, a pound of sugar to a pint of juice; boil until it ropes from the spoon, or from fifteen to twenty minutes. In making raspberry jelly use one-third currants and two-thirds raspberries.
12. To keep jellies from molding: Pulverize loaf sugar as fine as flour if possible, and cover the surface of the jelly with this to the depth of one-fourth of an inch. This will prevent mold, even if the jellies are kept for years.
By the rules we have given, jelly may be made of any of the fruits, but some fruits require strong pressure. In fact, the jelly bag may always be profitably twisted by means of a stick in the hands of two persons, the stick having been entangled in the end of the jelly bag.
These are general working rules for jelly from the era before boxed pectin, and they assume you know your fruit. The single most useful thing in the whole set is step 10's dipper test: when the syrup clings and sets on the side of the dipper rather than running off, the jelly is done, and no clock will tell you that.
- The dipper test in modern termsWhat the book calls coagulating on the dipper is the sheet or spoon test, and it corresponds to about 220F at sea level (8F above boiling water). A candy thermometer removes the guesswork; subtract roughly 1F per 500 feet of elevation.
- "When the sugar has thoroughly dissolved, the jelly will be done"This is only true for high-pectin fruit whose juice has already been boiled down hard, as in step 7. With low-pectin juice you will be boiling well past the point of dissolution. Trust the set test, not the sugar.
- Pectin, which the book never namesApples, crabapples, quinces, currants and underripe plums carry enough pectin and acid to set on their own; peaches, sweet cherries and most berries do not, which is exactly why the raspberry jelly is cut with one-third currants. Modern powdered or liquid pectin does the same job with far less boiling and a brighter flavor.
- Sugar amountsHalf a pint of sugar to a pint of juice is about 1 cup to 2 cups he berry ratio of a pound to a pint is roughly 2 1/4 cups sugar per 2 cups juice. Both are lower than commercial-pectin recipes call for, and both will need the longer boil the text describes.
- Loaf sugar and pulverized loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined cane sugar broken from a cone; plain granulated sugar is its equivalent. Where step 12 wants it pulverized "as fine as flour," that is superfine or caster sugar. Modern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch and is not the same thing.
- The brass kettleAcidic fruit attacks copper alloys, and the green verdigris that forms on a neglected brass pan is genuinely toxic " hence the insistence on scrubbing before and after. Use stainless steel or an enameled preserving pan and skip the question entirely. Aluminum will discolor the jelly.
- Twisting the bagTwo people and a stick will get you the most juice, but pressing a jelly bag forces pulp through and gives cloudy jelly. If clarity matters, let it drip unassisted for several hours; if yield matters, twist as the book says and accept the haze.
- Sealing, and the sugar capA quarter-inch of sugar over the surface does inhibit surface mold, but it is not a seal and the claim about keeping for years assumes a cold cellar. For shelf storage today, fill sterilized half-pint jars to 1/4 inch of the rim and process 5 to 10 minutes in a boiling-water bath; otherwise refrigerate and use within a month.
- YieldNo quantity is given anywhere. As a rough guide, 4 cups of strained juice with sugar at these ratios gives about four to five half-pint jars.
This is jelly-making as it stood just before commercial pectin changed the craft: the cook is expected to read the fruit, judge the boil by eye, and rely on tart, underripe, pectin-rich material to do chemically what a packet now does. Hence the currants, which appear here both as a jelly in their own right and as the setting agent stirred into raspberries. Pectin had been identified as a substance in the 1820s, but it was not sold to home cooks until the second decade of the twentieth century, and books of this vintage worked entirely by proportion and practice. The mold problem the last paragraph addresses was the real limit on keeping jelly, since open-kettle glasses were covered with paper, brandied paper, or later a disc of paraffin rather than sealed; a sugar cap was one of several traditional defenses, and the promise that it works "even if the jellies are kept for years" says more about the confidence of household manuals than about the fruit.