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Five Fruit Jelly
I quart cherries 1 pint apple juice The cherries should be ripe, the other fruit a little underripe. Stone the cherries, saving all the juice. Heat all the fruit together in a double boiler until the juice flows freely. Strain as usual and add the apple juice. Let the juice boil about twenty minutes. Add the hot sugar, a cup of sugar for each cup of juice, and let boil until it jellies.
A five-fruit jelly of the pre-commercial-pectin era, relying on underripe fruit and apple juice for setting power. Note that the ingredient list as printed gives only two of the five fruits, so some judgement is required before you start.
- The missing fruitsThe title promises five fruits and the list names cherries and apple juice only; the rest of the line appears not to have survived in this text. Jellies of this kind were commonly built from fruits such as currants, red or black, gooseberries, raspberries and underripe apples, all higher in acid and pectin. The recipe gives no quantities for the missing fruit, so any proportion is guesswork; lean on currant, gooseberry or underripe apple for the bulk of it or the jelly may not set.
- Cherries alone will not jellSweet ripe cherries are low in both pectin and acid, which is exactly why the recipe insists the other fruit be underripe and why apple juice is added. Do not increase the cherry proportion.
- "Hot sugar"The point is that the sugar goes in warm so as not to check the boil; period cooks commonly did this by spreading it in a pan in a low oven. Ten minutes or so in a low oven (around 250F) is enough; skip it if you like, but expect a slightly longer cook.
- "Strain as usual"This means a scalded jelly bag or several layers of cheesecloth, left to drip without pressing. Squeezing the bag forces pulp through and gives a cloudy jelly.
- The twenty-minute boilBoiling the plain juice hard for twenty minutes before the sugar goes in concentrates it, but it also degrades pectin. Modern practice is a much shorter cook in small batches. Work with no more than 4 to 6 cups of juice at a time and judge by consistency rather than the clock.
- Judging "until it jellies"The sheeting test off a cold metal spoon is the traditional gauge; a thermometer is faster. Jelly sets at 8F above the boiling point of water where you are, about 220F at sea level. Overshooting gives a stiff, dulled jelly.
- Equal sugar is deliberateA cup of sugar to a cup of juice is not excess sweetening; it is what makes the pectin network form and what preserves the finished jelly. Reducing it will give syrup.
- SealingThe book's era finished jelly under melted paraffin, which is no longer considered a reliable seal. Use current guidance for hot-filling and processing jelly jars, or refrigerate and eat within a few weeks.
- YieldNot given, and it cannot be reckoned closely because the quantity of the missing fruit is unknown. As a rough rule, each cup of strained juice yields a little over a cup of finished jelly.
Mixed-fruit jellies of this kind were a solution to a practical problem rather than an act of invention: no single fruit in the summer garden gave both good flavour and a dependable set, so cooks combined them. Cherries, raspberries and other low-pectin fruits supplied the taste while currants, gooseberries and underripe apples supplied the setting power and the acid. Apple juice in particular functioned as what we would now call added pectin, and household books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are often said to have advised keeping a supply of it for something like this purpose. Commercial powdered and liquid pectins reached American kitchens in the 1910s and 1920s and made such blending optional, though recipes titled for a count of fruits are commonly associated with the years before them. The instruction that fruit be "a little underripe" reflects the same knowledge, arrived at by observation long before pectin was understood chemically.