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Raspberry Jelly
Prepare the juice in the same manner as described under green-grape jelly. Can the juice, or make the jelly at once. Raspberry juice may be added to apple juice to secure a firmer jelly. The proportions may be half and half, or one third raspberry juice to two thirds apple juice.
Currant Jelly (Mrs. Henderson) Remove the leaves but not the stems from the currants. Weigh the fruit and allow half the weight in sugar. Put a few of the currants into a porcelain-lined dish. Mash them until the juice flows freely, then add the rest of the currants; heat gradually to the boiling point, then let boil briskly twenty minutes, stirring as needed to prevent scorching. Drain in a bag into an earthen dish. Heat the juice to the boiling point, let boil about two minutes, then add the sugar. (Have the sugar hot.) Put immediately into glasses. It will jelly on the cup with which it is dipped from the saucepan.
Two related jellies, both written for cooks working before commercial pectin existed. Currants and underripe fruit supplied the set themselves, which is why the sugar is low and the boiling times are long.
- The hinge: sugar at half the weight of fruitHalf the fruit's weight in sugar is roughly a 2:1 fruit-to-sugar ratio, far leaner than the 1:1 most modern jelly recipes use. It works only because red currants are unusually high in both pectin and acid. Do not carry the same ratio over to raspberries alone, which are low in pectin and will stay syrupy.
- Porcelain-lined dish and earthen dishBoth mean nonreactive: an enamelled or stainless pan and a ceramic or glass bowl. Bare copper, cast iron and untreated aluminium will dull the colour of red fruit and can pick up a metallic taste from the acid.
- Why raspberry is cut with appleApple juice, especially from tart or slightly underripe fruit, is a pectin donor. The one-third raspberry to two-thirds apple version is the safer bet for a firm set; half and half is more likely to work only if the apples are quite green.
- "Prepared as under green-grape jelly"The green-grape method is not reproduced here; on the usual pattern it would mean crush the fruit, heat it until the juice runs freely, then drain. Green grapes were favoured because unripe fruit tends to carry more pectin.
- Drain, do not squeezeHanging the bag and letting the juice fall under its own weight gives clear jelly. Wringing the bag forces through pulp and fine sediment and produces a cloudy set.
- Hot sugarThe direction to have the sugar hot is practical, not decorative. Warmed sugar dissolves without dropping the juice off the boil, so the mixture returns to setting temperature almost immediately and the colour stays bright. Spread it in a shallow pan in a 200F oven while the juice heats.
- Testing on the dipper"It will jelly on the cup" is the sheeting test: the last of the syrup clings to the edge and falls off in a sheet rather than in drops. On a thermometer that corresponds to about 220F at sea level, 8 degrees above boiling.
- "Glasses" and sealingJelly glasses of the period held 6 to 8 ounces and were sealed with melted paraffin, a method now abandoned because the wax shrinks and admits mould. Use half-pint jars and follow current tested guidance for processing and sealing. The instruction to "can the juice" gives no process at all; treat it as a note of intent and use a present-day tested procedure instead.
- YieldTwo pounds of currants with a pound of sugar gives roughly three to four half-pint glasses, depending on how hard the juice is boiled.
Currant jelly was the workhorse preserve of the nineteenth-century American pantry: red currants (Ribes rubrum) set so dependably that the jelly doubled as a sauce for mutton and game, a glaze for tarts, and a base for shrub and sickroom drinks. The attribution is almost certainly to Mary Foote Henderson, whose Practical Cooking and Dinner Giving was widely quarried by later compilers, and the borrowed-recipe habit tells you something about how domestic-science books of this period were assembled. The instruction to stretch raspberry juice with apple juice belongs to the same pre-pectin world: cooks learned by trial which fruits carried the setting power and which had to be propped up, and bottled pectin only reached the market in the 1910s. Currants themselves grew scarce in the United States shortly afterward, when states began banning Ribes cultivation because the plants host white pine blister rust, which is why a jelly once considered basic is now a specialist's project.