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Strawberry Jelly
Apples or currants should be added to strawberries, if a satisfactory jelly is to be made. As apples are not in season in strawberry time, it is best to can the strawberry juice without sugar and make up the jelly when apples are plenty. Prepare the apple juice in the usual manner. Use one pint of strawberry juice to two pints of apple juice and three fourths a cup of sugar to each cup of fruit juice. Cook the apple and strawberry juice together from fifteen to twenty minutes; add the sugar, made hot on plates in the oven, cook two or three minutes longer or to about 218° F. by the sugar thermometer. Have the glasses on a cloth in a pan of hot water. Fill the glasses at once.
Skim during the cooking as needed. Raspberries may be used in the same manner.
A two-stage jelly built around the fact that strawberries will not set on their own. The recipe assumes you have put up unsweetened strawberry juice in June and are finishing the jelly in the autumn.
- The hinge: apples are the pectinStrawberries are low in pectin and only modestly acidic, which is why two parts apple juice go in for every one of strawberry. Use juice extracted from tart, slightly underripe apples simmered with skins and cores, not bottled or filtered supermarket apple juice, which has been clarified and depectinized and will not gel.
- "Prepare the apple juice in the usual manner"Quarter tart apples without peeling or coring, barely cover with water, simmer until soft, then drip through a jelly bag without pressing. Squeezing the bag gives more juice and a cloudy jelly.
- Storing the strawberry juiceModern practice is to process the unsweetened juice in half-pint or pint jars in a boiling-water bath rather than sealing it hot and hoping, or simply to freeze it. Freezing costs nothing in flavour and is the easier route for a juice you intend to cook again.
- 218 degrees FThe jelly point is roughly 8 degrees F above the boiling point of water where you are cooking, which is about 220 F at sea level. Hill's 218 gives a soft set; add about 1 degree less for every 500 feet of elevation, and confirm with the sheeting test off a cold spoon.
- Heating the sugarWarming sugar on plates in the oven keeps the boiling juice from dropping off the boil when the sugar goes in; the recipe gives no temperature for it. It is still worth doing, and it shortens the second cooking, which protects colour and flavour.
- Proportions and yieldThree-quarters of a cup of sugar per cup of combined juice. One pint strawberry plus two pints apple is 6 cups of juice and 4 1/2 cups of sugar, yielding roughly 6 to 7 half-pints depending on how hard you boil.
- The glasses in hot waterThe cloth and the pan of hot water keep thin glass from cracking when the boiling jelly hits it. Use standard canning jars, filled to a quarter-inch of the rim.
- SealingHill's era finished jelly glasses with a paraffin cap. That method is no longer recommended, as the wax shrinks and admits mould. Use two-piece lids and a five-minute boiling-water process, or refrigerate and eat within a few weeks.
This belongs to the last generation of jelly-making before commercial pectin changed the arithmetic. Until commercial liquid pectin became a household good in the years around the First World War, a cook wanting strawberry jelly had no choice but to borrow set from another fruit, and apple was the standard lender: cheap, abundant in autumn, and mild enough not to bully the strawberry flavour. Currants served the same purpose earlier in the summer, which is why they appear in the first line as the alternative. The two-season workaround here, canning the juice in June and finishing the jelly when apples are plenty, is a good picture of how a well-run pantry once worked, with the preserving calendar stretched across months rather than compressed into a single afternoon. The book comes out of the Boston Cooking School circle, where precise sugar thermometry and stated temperatures were pressed on home cooks as a matter of principle, and the specified 218 degrees F is exactly that argument in miniature.