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Four-Fruit Jelly,
Take equal quantities of ripe strawberries, raspberries, currants, and red cherries, all should be fully ripe, and the cherries must be stoned, taking care to preserve the juice that escapes in stoning, and add it to the rest. Mix the fruit together, put it into a linen bag, and squeeze it thoroughly; when it has ceased to drip, measure the juice, and to every pint allow a pound and two ounces of the best loaf-sugar, in large lumps. Mix the juice and sugar together; put them in a porcelain-lined preserving kettle, and boil for half an hour, skimming frequently. Try the jelly by dipping out a spoonful, and holding it in the open air; if it congeals readily it is sufficiently done. This jelly is very fine. - Mrs. E. S. Miller.
A four-fruit jelly built on the one ingredient that makes it set: currants. The sugar ratio and the boil are both generous by modern standards, so test for set rather than trusting the clock.
- The hinge: currants carry the pectinStrawberries, raspberries and cherries are all comparatively low in pectin. Keep the currants a full quarter of the mix by weight or the jelly will stay syrup, and use fruit that is ripe but not mushy, since pectin declines as fruit softens.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined cane sugar sold in hard cones or cut lumps, prized because it was cleaner than brown or muscovado and threw less scum. Plain granulated sugar is the same thing now; weigh it, at 18 oz per pint of juice.
- The ratio in modern termsA pint and 18 oz works out to roughly 500 g sugar per 475 ml juice, slightly more sugar than juice by weight. That is on the high side of current practice but it is what makes the set reliable without added pectin.
- Half an hour is a maximum, not a targetWith this much sugar the jelly will often reach setting point in 10 to 20 minutes in a wide pan. Overboiling darkens the colour and can push it past a jelly into a stiff, dulled paste, so start testing early.
- Testing for setThe open-air spoon test is sound and still works: dip out a little, let it cool a few seconds, and see whether it wrinkles and holds. A thermometer reading of 220F (104C) at sea level gives the same information faster.
- Squeezing the bagWringing a linen bag extracts more juice but forces pulp through, and the jelly will be cloudy rather than clear. For a bright jelly, hang the bag and let it drip unpressed; the yield will be appreciably lower.
- The kettle"Porcelain-lined" mattered because bare copper and iron discoloured red fruit and reacted with the acid. Use stainless steel or enamel, and pick a wide pan: surface area, not depth, controls how fast the jelly boils down.
- Sealing and yieldThe recipe stops at the boil and says nothing about jars, as many nineteenth-century jelly recipes did, leaving the cook to close them with a paper or wax cover. Ladle into hot sterilised jars and either refrigerate or follow a current water-bath processing time. About 4 lb of mixed fruit yields something near two pints of juice.
Mixed-fruit jellies of this kind belong to the short weeks in early summer when strawberries, raspberries, red currants and cherries all overlap in a northern garden, and combining them solved two problems at once: no single crop had to be large enough on its own, and the currants supplied the pectin and acid the others lacked. Buckeye Cookery grew out of a community cookbook compiled in Ohio in 1876 and appeared as Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping in 1877; it was assembled from contributions by named local women, which is why this one carries Mrs. E. S. Miller's signature, and its jelly chapter assumes a household putting up its own fruit rather than buying preserves. The insistence on the "best loaf-sugar" is a period detail worth noting, since sugar then came in grades that varied visibly in colour and cleanliness, and the whitest was the most expensive choice a cook could make for a preserve she wanted clear and red.