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Cranberry Jelly
Prepare juice as in general directions, add one pound sugar to every pint, boil and skim, test by dropping a little into cold water (when it does not mingle with the water it is done), rinse glasses in cold water before pouring in the jelly to prevent sticking. The pulp may be sweetened and used for sauce.-C. G. & E. W. Crane, Caldwell, N. J.
A bare-bones jelly formula from a book that expected you to have read its general directions first. Cranberries are so high in pectin and acid that this works with nothing but fruit and sugar.
- "Juice as in general directions"Simmer the berries with just enough water to keep them from scorching (about a cup per quart of fruit) until every berry has burst, then drain through a jelly bag or several layers of damp cheesecloth. Do not squeeze the bag if you want a clear jelly.
- The sugar ratioOne pound of sugar to one pint of juice is roughly 2 cups sugar to 2 cups juice, near enough to equal volumes. Cranberries carry enough pectin and acid that this sets without commercial pectin.
- The cold-water testThis is the test that matters here: a drop that holds its shape in cold water instead of dispersing is at gel stage. A thermometer reading of 220F at sea level, or a spoonful that sheets off in a curtain rather than drops, tells you the same thing.
- Boil hard and brieflyBring the sweetened juice to a full rolling boil and work fast, in batches of no more than 4 to 6 cups. Long slow boiling breaks pectin down and darkens the colour; large batches take so long to reach temperature that the set suffers.
- SkimmingThe foam is trapped air and protein, not a problem in itself, but it clouds the finished jelly. A knob of butter the size of a pea will reduce it if you would rather not skim.
- "Glasses rinsed in cold water"Nineteenth-century jelly glasses were filled hot, cooled, and commonly covered with paper or sealed with a paraffin disc. Use clean hot canning jars instead; for keeping, follow current water-bath processing times, or simply refrigerate the jelly and use it within a few weeks.
- YieldNot stated. Two pounds of cranberries yield roughly a pint and a half of juice, which with sugar gives on the order of four half-pint jars, depending on how far it is boiled down.
- The pulpWorth doing. The strained pulp pushed through a sieve to remove skins and sweetened to taste is cranberry sauce, as the recipe itself suggests.
Cranberries were one of the few native North American fruits that entered nineteenth-century American cookery essentially unchanged, and their virtue in a jelly chapter was reliability -- so much pectin and acid that the set almost cannot fail, in an era before commercial pectin was sold. Buckeye Cookery (1877; the book grew out of the Buckeye Cookbook compiled at Marysville, Ohio) collected contributions from women across several states, and the Crane contributors' credit line from Caldwell, New Jersey, points at the Atlantic cranberry country, where the Pine Barrens bogs were being planted commercially through the 1860s and 1870s. The instruction to rinse the glasses in cold water before filling belongs to a period when jelly was stored in tumblers under paraffin or paper rather than in sealed jars, and a jelly that would turn out whole onto a plate was part of the point.