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Apple and Cranberry Jelly
The apples and cranberries may be cooked together, just as apples are when used alone for jelly, or the two varieties of juice may be taken separately. For the latter, take one quart of apple juice and one cup and a half of cranberry juice. To secure the cranberry juice, put three pints of cranberries over the fire with a cup and a half of boiling water, cover, and let cook rapidly until the skins burst, then drain in a bag. Let the apple and cranberry juice boil twenty minutes, add four cups and a quarter of sugar made hot in the oven, and let boil two or three minutes. Strain the pulp left in the bag through a purée sieve, reheat to the boiling point; remove from the fire and stir in two or two and one half cups of sugar. Do not reheat.
This should be used at once, or by reheating to the boiling point, it may be stored in a can in the usual manner.
A two-for-one recipe: a clear jelly from strained juice, and a soft cranberry-apple butter from the pulp left in the bag. Both depend on the natural pectin in underripe apples and cranberry skins, since no commercial pectin is used.
- Use tart, underripe applesThe pectin and acid come entirely from the fruit. Windfalls, crabapples or firm Granny Smiths, cores and skins included, set far more reliably than sweet dessert apples. Cranberries are high in both pectin and acid, which is why the pairing works.
- Test for the set, don't trust the clockTwenty minutes of boiling followed by two or three minutes after the sugar is a guide, not a rule. Cook until the jelly sheets off a cold metal spoon in a curtain rather than drops, or reaches 220F (8F above boiling water at your altitude).
- Sugar heated in the ovenWarming the sugar on a tray in a low oven keeps it from chilling the boiling juice and dropping the batch off the boil. It is a real convenience, not a superstition. The recipe gives no temperature or time, so keep the heat gentle and stir occasionally so the sugar does not colour.
- Purée sieveA food mill fitted with a medium plate, or a stiff nylon sieve worked with a ladle, both do the job. What comes through is the second product, closer to a spreadable fruit butter than a jelly.
- Draining in a bagA jelly bag, or a double layer of scalded cheesecloth in a colander, hung to drip for two to four hours. Squeezing extracts more juice but clouds the finished jelly, which is the whole point of straining.
- YieldHard to state precisely, since it depends on how far the juice reduces, but the quart of apple juice and cup and a half of cranberry juice with four and a quarter cups of sugar should give somewhere in the region of six half-pint jars of jelly, plus roughly two to three half-pints of the sweetened pulp.
- The pulp will not keep as writtenTwo to two and a half cups of sugar stirred into hot pulp off the heat is a fresh preserve. The instruction is explicit that it be used at once unless reheated to boiling and canned, and that is worth honoring; refrigerate it and treat it as a week's worth.
- Sealing"In the usual manner" in period preserving often meant paraffin wax or inverting the jar; the recipe does not say which. Follow current practice instead: hot jelly into hot sterilized jars, two-piece lids, and a boiling water bath for the time your jar size calls for.
- Cooking the fruits togetherFor the combined method the book gives no ratio. Roughly three parts sliced apple to one part cranberry by volume, barely covered with water, gives a jelly with clear cranberry character without losing the apple's setting power.
This comes from an era when jelly making was a matter of managing the fruit's own pectin, and cookbooks organized recipes around which fruits could carry a set and which needed help. Apples were the standard pectin donor, added to everything from quince to grape; cranberries are one of the few fruits that need no such assistance, being both very acid and very high in pectin, which is why cranberry sauce firms up on its own. Pairing them was practical as much as culinary, since both come in at the same point in the autumn in the northeastern United States and cranberries alone can be austere. The double use of the fruit here, clear jelly from the drained juice and a sweetened purée from what stays in the bag, reflects a household economy in which throwing away the pulp from several pints of berries would have been unthinkable. The instruction to heat sugar in the oven before adding it makes sense in a kitchen where a coal or wood range meant regaining a hard boil quickly was not guaranteed.