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Jelly Making
I (a) Put soft fruit into a saucepan, crush with a pestle, and let heat slowly; when hot throughout, drain in a bag, then press out juice, or add water to pulp and make one or two more extractions. (b) Cover hard fruits, - as apples, quinces, and plums, - in water and cook until soft. The skin, seeds, and stones give color and flavor to the jelly and should be retained. When soft, drain. The cores of quinces contain a gummy substance that makes their use impracticable. 2 Heat juice quickly to boiling point, can it, or boil a certain time, add hot sugar and boil to jelly. 3 Skim and store in sterile glasses.
Blueberry Jelly No. I Cook and drain the fruit according to previous directions. Set over a quick fire and heat to the boiling point; let boil six or seven minutes; add one cup of sugar, made hot in the oven, IIO for each cup of juice; let boil one or two minutes, then pour into the glasses. The glasses must be ready in a pan of hot water as the mixture will often jelly in the saucepan, if there is a moment of delay in turning it into the glasses.
Blueberry Jelly No. 2 Cut a large lemon in very thin slices; let stand over night in cold water to cover; add the lemon and water to three quarts of blueberries and let cook and drain in the usual manner.
Finish as Blueberry Jelly No. 1.
Blueberry Jelly No. 3 After the juice has drained from blueberries prepared for jelly making, turn the contents of the bag into a saucepan, add water to cover, and a lemon cut in thin slices if desired; mix thoroughly and let cook slowly until boiling throughout; drain in a bag and measure; let boil ten minutes (about), then add half a cup of sugar for each cup of liquid (have the sugar hot); let boil till the liquid forms drops of jelly when turned from the spoon (three to five minutes), then turn into glasses. 4 quarts barberries
This is a general method for extracting fruit juice followed by three blueberry jelly variations. Blueberries are low in pectin and acid, which explains the lemon in Nos. 2 and 3 and the very short boils throughout.
- The hinge: have the glasses hot and waitingThe original says the mixture will often set in the saucepan if there is a moment's delay. That is accurate — once a low-pectin juice reaches the gel point it goes fast. Stand the jars in a pan of hot water before the final boil begins, not after.
- Heating the sugarWarming sugar in the oven keeps the boiling juice from dropping off temperature when the sugar goes in, which matters in these short-boil methods. The book gives no oven setting, only 'made hot in the oven'; use a low oven and spread the sugar on a tray. Cold sugar lengthens the boil.
- "A quick fire"High heat. Jelly is boiled hard and fast so the juice reaches the gel point before the fruit flavour cooks away. Use the widest pan you have to speed evaporation.
- Judging the set'Forms drops of jelly when turned from the spoon' is the spoon test: the syrup thickens and falls in heavy jellied drops rather than running off thin. (Cooks later described a further stage, the sheet test, where the drops run together and fall in a curtain.) A thermometer reading of 220F at sea level, or a spoonful chilled on a cold saucer, is easier to read.
- Sugar proportions differ on purposeNo. 1 uses a cup of sugar per cup of juice; No. 3, made from the pressed pulp of the first extraction, uses half a cup, because that second-run juice is weaker and more dilute. Do not swap the ratios.
- StrainingThe "bag" is a jelly bag or a double layer of scalded cheesecloth in a colander. Let it drip; squeezing gives more juice but a cloudy jelly. No. 3 is the frugal answer to that problem — it re-cooks the pulp rather than wringing the bag.
- Sealing and storage'Store in sterile glasses': jelly glasses of this period were commonly sealed with paraffin and kept in a cool cellar, though the recipe does not say so. Current practice is a two-piece lid with a five- to ten-minute boiling-water bath, or refrigeration and use within a few weeks.
- The trailing line'4 quarts barberries' appears to be the start of another recipe, caught by the page break. It has nothing to do with the blueberry jellies.
Blueberries are abundant and cheap in season but poor in the pectin and acid a jelly needs, which is why a book of this era offers three approaches to the same fruit rather than one. The lemon in Nos. 2 and 3 supplies the missing acid. Note that the recipe itself gives a different reason for retaining skins, seeds and stones in hard fruits — 'they give color and flavor to the jelly' — rather than invoking pectin. This all predates the household use of commercial pectin, generally traced to the 1910s and 1920s, when bottled and powdered extracts made low-pectin fruits more straightforward and reduced the need for careful second and third extractions. The instruction to heat the sugar in the oven, and to re-cook the spent pulp for a weaker second jelly, both belong to a period when fuel and fruit were worth conserving and a cook's judgment of a spoonful of syrup stood in for a thermometer.