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Cranberry Jelly
Boil the juice secured by draining fifteen to twenty minutes, add the hot sugar, a cup for each cup of juice, and boil one or two minutes.
Cranberry Jelly No. 2 Wash the cranberries, let cook in a double boiler or waterless cooker until soft throughout, turn into a cloth and let drain; when cold, press all the juice possible from the bag. Take a cup of sugar for each cup of juice. Reheat the juice to the boiling point, add the hot sugar, let boil one minute.
Two short methods for the same jelly, both relying on the fact that cranberries carry more pectin and acid than almost any other fruit — which is why one minute of boiling with sugar is genuinely enough. The text is a fragment: the first line picks up from a preceding recipe in which the fruit has already been cooked with water and hung to drain.
- Hot sugarWarming the sugar helps keep the short boil short. Spread it in a shallow pan in a low oven (about 250F) for 10-15 minutes; cold sugar drops the juice below boiling and forces you to cook longer, which darkens the colour and dulls the flavour.
- Why one minute worksCranberries are around pH 2.5 and very high in pectin, so a minute's boiling is enough for the jelly to set as it cools. Boiling much beyond that tends to give a stiff jelly with a cooked taste rather than a better set.
- Waterless cookerAn early twentieth-century heavy lidded pot designed to cook on retained steam. A heavy saucepan with a tight lid over low heat does the same thing; the point is that no added water dilutes the juice.
- Draining and pressingPressing the bag, as No. 2 directs, gives more juice but a cloudy jelly. For a clear one, let it drip unassisted for several hours and accept the lower yield.
- Proportions and yieldCup for cup by volume. How much juice you get depends on how thoroughly the berries are cooked and drained, so measure the juice and match the sugar to it rather than working from the weight of fruit.
- Testing the setNeither version gives a test. Chill a saucer in the freezer, drop a little jelly on it, and look for a skin that wrinkles when nudged after a minute.
- Storing itBooks of this period generally directed hot jelly into hot sterilized glasses sealed with paraffin, though this fragment gives no instruction. Skip the wax: pour into hot half-pint jars leaving a quarter-inch of headspace and either refrigerate for a few weeks or process in a boiling-water bath for the pantry.
Cranberry jelly earned its place in preserving manuals because it is the easiest gel in the book — the fruit supplies its own pectin and acid, so no lemon juice, no apple stock, and no commercial pectin is required, which mattered in the years before bottled pectin was widely sold. The American cranberry, Vaccinium macrocarpon, was harvested from wild bogs in New England and New Jersey long before it was cultivated in the nineteenth century, and its keeping quality — the berries store for months in a cool cellar — made it one of the few fruits a household could put up well after the summer canning rush. Two numbered versions of the same jelly, one starting from a cooked-and-drained juice and one from berries steamed dry in a double boiler or "waterless cooker," is characteristic of books from this period, which seem to have printed competing methods side by side and let the cook choose according to her equipment.