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Strawberry or Raspberry Jam
To one pound of berries allow one and one-quarter pounds of sugar; heat an earthen bowl hot on the stove, then remove it from the stove and put into it the berries and sugar, and beat them hard with a wooden spoon for as much as an hour and a half; do not cook at all, but put in jars with egg papers.
X. Jellies.
JELLY making is not difficult. It simply requires exactness and care. 1. The fruit for jellies requires to be ripe, but not dead ripe, for if much overripe the juice is not so rich. 2. The fruit must be gathered when dry; it must not be wet with rain and dew. 3. It should not lie long in bulk after being picked. Here is where those who raise their own fruit have the advantage, for any purpose, over those who buy their fruit: it is always fresh.
This is an uncooked jam: the fruit is never heated, and the sugar alone is expected to preserve it in a paper-covered jar at room temperature. That last assumption is where it fails, and no amount of beating fixes it.
- No heat step at allThe bowl is warmed and then taken off the stove; the fruit and sugar never reach a temperature that kills yeasts or moulds carried in on the berries. Strawberries in particular sit close to the ground, and neither fruit is easy to wash clean.
- The seal is not a seal"Egg papers" are rounds of paper brushed with egg white, laid over the jam or across the mouth of the jar, tightening to a skin as they dry. They exclude dust and slow evaporation; they do not exclude air or produce a vacuum, and books of the period routinely tell the cook to remove any mould that forms on the surface. Current advice is to discard soft mouldy foods entirely rather than skim them.
- Sugar concentration is not high enough to make up for itOne and a quarter pounds of sugar to a pound of fruit sounds enormous, but the berries are around 90 per cent water and none of that water is boiled off. The finished water activity sits well above the level at which osmotic pressure alone holds spoilage organisms in check, which is why cooked jams are reduced rather than merely sweetened.
- What the recipe is actually describingBeaten cold and packed at once, this is close to what is now sold as freezer jam. Modern versions of that idea rely on refrigeration or freezing from the moment they are made, and on tested pectin ratios. If you want an uncooked berry preserve, use a current tested recipe with its storage instructions.
- The hour and a half of beatingThere is no pectin extraction happening here. The prolonged beating with a wooden spoon dissolves the sugar crystals in the cold juice and breaks the fruit down, and it is the only thickening mechanism the recipe has. It is genuine labour, and a stand mixer would not replicate it kindly.
- The earthen bowlThe recipe does not say why the bowl is heated; the likely reason is that a cold thick-walled bowl chills the mixture and slows the sugar dissolving. Earthenware also avoids the metals, iron and tin among them, that discolour raw fruit acid.
- The jelly notes that followThe three numbered points belong to the jelly chapter, not to this jam, and they remain sound: slightly underripe fruit carries more pectin than dead-ripe fruit, surface water dilutes the juice, and picked berries begin to break down within hours.
Uncooked or "raw" jams appear regularly in English and American household books through the nineteenth century, usually for raspberries and strawberries specifically, on the argument that boiling drives off the fresh perfume of those two fruits above all others. The method assumes a cool larder, a household that eats its preserves within weeks rather than storing them a year, and probably a cook who was untroubled by a skim of mould. Egg papers were among the standard closures before the zinc screw-cap glass jar became cheap and universal in American kitchens in the later part of the century; recipe books of this period sit awkwardly astride the two technologies, giving old paper-and-bowl methods in one paragraph and processed jars in the next. The insistence in the jelly notes on fruit gathered dry and used at once is a reminder that these instructions were written for households with their own fruit canes, where the interval between picking and preserving was measured in minutes.