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Hip Jam
Scarlet hips make a delicious jam. This fruit of the wild rose must be gathered before it has grown soft and flabby. The largest and finest hips should be chosen. Lay on a clean, coarse cloth, rub carefully, cut off the stalks and crowns, and carefully extract the little seeds with a small penknife, as on this the success of the jam depends. Throw the hips into boiling water, parboil, and then strain off the water. Rub the fruit through a sieve, and boil in clarified sugar (see SUGAR, TO CLARIFY), allowing a pint of the syrup to a quart of fruit, stirring all the time with a wooden spoon till the jam is of sufficient thickness. When cold, add to each pound of fruit two dessert-spoonfuls of white-wine vinegar and six cloves. Put into jam-pots, and cover with oiled paper.
A wild-harvest preserve from a fruit most cooks now walk past. Almost everything about its success turns on the cleaning stage, and the keeping qualities are poorer than a modern jam-maker would expect.
- The hinge: seeds and hairsRose hips are packed with seeds surrounded by fine bristly hairs that irritate the mouth and gut — the same hairs once sold as itching powder. The recipe is right that the whole thing depends on removing them; halve each hip, scrape the cavity clean, and after parboiling push the pulp through a fine sieve rather than a coarse one so no hairs pass through.
- When to pick"Before it has grown soft and flabby" means firm, fully scarlet hips, usually late September into October. Frosted or blet hips are easier to purée but have lost much of their acidity and vitamin C, and they collapse into a dull, seedy mush.
- Quart of fruitThis is a volume measure of the sieved pulp, not of whole hips. An imperial quart of purée is roughly 2 1/2 lb, and it takes a considerable weight of raw hips to yield it, since seeds and skin are discarded.
- Clarified sugarThe cross-reference is to a syrup of sugar and water boiled and skimmed; Victorian clarifying usually meant whisking in egg white to carry up the impurities, which modern refined sugar does not need. Use plain sugar syrup, or simply weigh the sugar into the pulp.
- Sugar ratio and keepingA pint of syrup to a quart of pulp is well under the roughly equal weights of sugar and fruit that make a jam self-preserving. This will not keep at room temperature under oiled paper; treat it as a fresh conserve, pot it into sterilised jars and keep it refrigerated, eating it within a few weeks.
- Vinegar and clovesAdding two dessertspoons of white-wine vinegar and six cloves per pound after cooling is a flavouring and mild preservative gesture, and it also sharpens a purée that can taste flat. Six whole cloves per pound is assertive; bruise them and fish them out before potting if you want the perfume without the bite.
- ThicknessRose hips carry some pectin, but the purée thickens mainly by evaporation, so expect a long, spitting boil in a wide pan and constant stirring — it catches easily. Wooden spoon and a heavy-bottomed pan, as written.
- YieldA quart of pulp with a pint of syrup reduces to several half-pound jars, depending on how far you take the boiling.
The hip is the fruit of the wild rose, most often Rosa canina, the dog rose of English hedgerows, and it belongs to the long tradition of hedge harvest — sloes, crabs, elderberries, blackberries — that cost nothing but labour and turns up throughout Victorian household books. Hips were valued in older cookery for their sharp, apricot-like flavour; their exceptionally high vitamin C content was not identified until the twentieth century, when British wartime collection schemes turned rose-hip syrup into a national product. Cassell's gives the recipe with the workmanlike detail typical of the dictionary format: no romance about foraging, just the warning that the seeds decide whether the jam is worth eating. The finishing touch of vinegar and cloves points back to an older, less sweet idea of preserves, closer to a spiced conserve served with meat than to a breakfast jam.