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Cranberry Jelly
Pick over and wash one quart cranberries. Seed two-thirds cup raisins; add to cranberries; add one cup boiling water and boil twenty minutes. Rub through a sieve, and add to pulp two cups sugar and two-thirds cups scalded seeded raisins; cook five minutes, stirring constantly. Turn into a mold previously wet with cold water.
Chill and serve.
A cranberry sauce stiff enough to unmold, thickened by the fruit's own pectin rather than gelatin. Nothing here has to change, but a few of the measures and ingredients need translating.
- A quart of cranberriesBerries were commonly sold by the quart measure. A quart is about 4 cups, or roughly 1 lb — a 12 oz bag plus about another cup from a second.
- Seeded raisinsRaisins sold with seeds still in them were common in this period and had to be pitted by hand, hence the instruction. Use ordinary seedless raisins and skip the step entirely; two-thirds cup is about 3 1/2 oz.
- Scalded raisinsScalding means covering them with boiling water for a minute or two, then draining. It plumps them so they stay soft in the set jelly instead of turning to leather.
- The hinge: sugar goes in after the sieveThe first twenty-minute boil is with water only. Sugar tends to firm fruit tissue, so holding it back until the fruit has broken down is the likely reason for the order here.
- SievingPress the hot pulp through a medium sieve or food mill with the back of a ladle and discard the skins and seeds. A chinois gives a smoother jelly; a colander is too coarse.
- The last five minutesOnce two cups of sugar are in, the mixture scorches readily and will spit. Stirring constantly is not fussiness — keep the heat moderate and use a wide pan.
- The moldWetting the mold with cold water is what lets the jelly slide out; oil or spray works as well. Chill at least four hours, ideally overnight, before turning out. It should set firm — cranberries are high in pectin.
- YieldRoughly 3 to 4 cups of finished jelly, enough for eight to ten servings alongside roast turkey or pork. It keeps a week to ten days covered in the refrigerator.
Cranberries are one of the few fruits in these books that is genuinely native to North America, and by the time this recipe was printed they were a commercial crop — the bogs of Cape Cod had been cultivated since the early nineteenth century, with southern New Jersey following somewhat later, and the fruit's keeping qualities made it a reliable late-autumn staple long before refrigeration was common. The name is generally traced to the Low German or Dutch kraanbeere, "crane berry," said to describe the shape of the flower's drooping stem. The raisins are a notable feature of the recipe, sweetening and stretching the tart fruit rather than leaving the work to sugar alone. Setting it in a mold and turning it out whole was the expected presentation — a molded jelly on a glass dish signaled a properly dressed table.