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Grape Jam
Wash the grapes picked from the stems, press with thumb and forefinger on the grapes, one by one, to separate the pulp from the skin.
Heat the pulp over the fire until it softens and changes color a little, then with a pestle rub the pulp through a purée strainer, leaving the seeds in the strainer. To the pulp, add the skins and sugar to equal the weight of the skins and pulp.
Mix thoroughly and let cook about fifteen minutes. Store as jelly or as canned fruit. Raspberry, Strawberry, or Blackberry Jam Prepare the fruit; allow three fourths a pound of sugar to a pound of fruit; crush the fruit, put it over the fire, and let boil twenty minutes; add part of the sugar, and when again boiling, still more of the sugar; continue until all the sugar is used, then boil till, when tested on a cold saucer, the mixture does not separate or grow watery. By heating the sugar in the oven all may be added at once.
Raspberry or Blackberry Jam Without Seeds Prepare the fruit; mash with a wooden pestle, set over a slack fire (or boiling water) and let become very hot, then press through an exceedingly fine sieve. Add about a cup of boiling water to the portion that does not pass the sieve and heat over the fire, then press as much more pulp as possible through the sieve; weigh the juice and pulp; add an equal weight of sugar and let boil until thick, stirring often.
This may be made with less sugar. Apple juice may be used in place of the water added to the seeds to aid in freeing the pulp from the seeds. This pulp may be canned without sugar for use in sherbets, ice-cream, and Melba sauce.
Simply heat it to the boiling point and store in sterile jars. Fill the jars to overflow and close at once with sterile covers.
Rhubarb Jam (Scotland) Select the red stalks of rhubarb, as it makes the richest colored preserve. Take off the strings of skin, but keep as much of the red underneath as possible. Cut the stalks into half-inch slices, cover with an equal weight of sugar, and let stand over night. For each three or four pounds of fruit, add the grated rind and juice of one lemon. Let boil half an hour after it comes to the boiling point, then let simmer very gently another half an hour. An ounce of blanched, sweet almonds, sliced thin, may be added.
Four jams in one entry, all built on the same logic: weigh the fruit, weigh the sugar against it, and boil until the mixture sets. The grape method is the fussiest and the one worth reading closely.
- The hinge: skins and pulp separatelyThe grape recipe only works with slip-skin grapes such as Concord, where the pulp pops free of the skin under thumb pressure. Seedless table grapes will not separate this way and the whole procedure is pointless with them.
- Purée strainerA conical chinois with a wooden pestle, or a food mill fitted with the fine plate. Either will hold back grape seeds while passing the softened pulp. A blender will shatter the seeds and make the jam bitter and gritty.
- Sugar equal to weight"Sugar to equal the weight of the skins and pulp" means 1:1 by weight — about 2 lb sugar to 2 lb of prepared fruit. The berry jam at three-quarters of a pound to the pound is roughly 340 g sugar per 450 g fruit. Use a scale; volume measures will not give the same set.
- Twenty minutes before the sugarBoiling crushed berries hard before sweetening drives off water and concentrates pectin, which is why the sugar goes in staged. It is not an error, but expect substantial reduction and stir often, as unsweetened fruit scorches readily.
- Heating the sugar in the ovenWarm sugar dissolves without dropping the boil, so it can all go in at once. The book gives no temperature or time; a low oven for a short spell is enough. A useful shortcut that still works.
- Slack fireA dying fire — the lowest steady heat, or a bowl over simmering water as the recipe itself suggests. Use it for the initial softening only, not for the final boil.
- The cold saucer testThe wrinkle test on a chilled plate remains the reliable one. On a thermometer, setting point is 220F at sea level, roughly 2F lower per 1,000 feet of elevation.
- RhubarbStalks only. Rhubarb leaves contain oxalic acid in quantity and are never used. The overnight sugaring draws out juice and firms the slices so they hold their shape through the hour of cooking.
- Storage — do not follow as written'Store as jelly' in this period would most often have meant a paraffin seal, and the unsweetened berry pulp is canned here by the open-kettle method, filling hot jars and closing them with no processing. Neither is accepted practice: both allow mold and spoilage organisms in as the jar cools. Use a current tested water-bath process, or refrigerate and freeze the finished jam.
- YieldNone is given. Roughly 2 lb of fruit plus its sugar fills about four to five half-pint jars, depending on how far you reduce it.
Jam in this book sits at the point where household preserving was being rewritten by domestic-science teachers, who insisted on weighing fruit and sugar rather than working by the eye and the ladle — hence the repeated "allow three fourths a pound of sugar to a pound of fruit." The grape method reflects an American kitchen: slip-skin varieties like the Concord, selected in Massachusetts in the mid-nineteenth century and widely grown in the eastern United States by 1900, have a tough skin, a soft seedy pulp and a foxy flavor much of which sits in the skin, which is why the recipe goes to the trouble of separating the two and then reuniting them. The note that seedless pulp can be canned plain for sherbets, ice cream and Melba sauce is a period marker in itself: Melba sauce, generally traced to Escoffier's peach dish for the singer Nellie Melba, was by this date familiar in American cookbooks as a raspberry purée.