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Medlar Jelly
Get quite ripe medlars, without bruise; let them simmer gently, with water about half an inch over the tops. When fit to pulp, strain the fruit through a jelly-bag; if not clear the first time, repeat the straining; add to every pint of juice, a pound of good loaf sugar, boil fast, skimming constantly. When cooled a little, pour the jelly into glasses or moulds, to be turned out for dessert. The jelly should be quickly boiled until it will set.
A short recipe that assumes you know what a ripe medlar is, which is the whole difficulty. Everything else is standard jelly-making.
- "Quite ripe" means blettedMedlars are inedible hard and green; they must be left in a single layer in a cool place for two to four weeks until the flesh goes brown, soft and pulpy — the process called bletting. Fruit that is only tree-ripe will not pulp, and fruit that has gone black and fermented will taste of it.
- Set with slightly under-bletted fruitPectin falls away as bletting advances, so a mix of fully bletted fruit for flavour and firmer, part-bletted fruit for setting power gives the most reliable jelly. Some cooks add a couple of chopped tart apples or a squeeze of lemon juice for the same reason; the original recipe relies on the fruit alone.
- Sugar ratio and unitsA pound of sugar to a pint of juice is roughly 450 g to 570 ml if you read the pint as imperial, which in an English book of this date you should. In US measures that is about 1 lb sugar to 2 1/3 cups juice — a high but normal preserving ratio.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined cane sugar broken from a cone, prized because it was clean and pale and gave a clear jelly. Ordinary granulated or preserving sugar does the same job now.
- Do not squeeze the bagLet the pulp drip through the jelly-bag unaided, for several hours or overnight. Pressing or wringing it forces fine solids through and produces a cloudy jelly, which is what the instruction to "repeat the straining" is guarding against.
- Boil fast, and test"Until it will set" means setting point, 220F / 104.5C on a sugar thermometer, or a spoonful that wrinkles when pushed on a chilled saucer. Fast boiling in a wide pan is deliberate — slow boiling darkens the jelly and dulls the flavour. Expect 10 to 20 minutes after the sugar has dissolved.
- Glasses, moulds, and keepingTurning jelly out of a mould for dessert requires a very firm set and was a Victorian table conceit. For a preserve, pot into hot sterilised jars and seal at once; refrigerate after opening.
- YieldRoughly 2 lb of bletted medlars gives about a pint of juice, and a pint of juice with a pound of sugar makes about 1 1/2 lb of finished jelly — two or three small jars.
The medlar (Mespilus germanica) was a standard fruit of European orchards from Roman times through the Middle Ages, valued precisely because it came in late and kept in the fruit loft into winter, when little else was available. Its peculiarity is bletting: the fruit must decay past ordinary ripeness before it becomes edible, which gave rise to a long tradition of jokes about it in English writing, Shakespeare among them. By the Victorian period medlars were largely a country and old-garden fruit rather than a market one. The jelly is one of the few preparations that suits it, since the strained juice keeps the fruit's mild winey flavour without the granular flesh.