Home › The Principles of Cookery › Orange Jelly
Orange Jelly
Take four pints of apple juice, made according to the directions given for apple jelly (see APPLE JELLY). Put with this the strained juice of half a dozen oranges, and let it run through a jelly-bag to make it clear. Put into the jelly-bag the thin yellow rind of three oranges. Boil two pounds and a half of loaf sugar with a quart of water. Skim it well, and clear away with a sponge the thick white scum that settles on the sides of the pan. When it is a thick syrup put the juice with it, and boil until a little jelly put upon a plate will set. Turn into pots for use.
A pectin-rich apple jelly carrying orange flavour, from the days before bottled pectin. The whole thing hinges on boiling to the setting point rather than for any stated time.
- Setting pointThere is no timing given because none can be: boil until a spoonful cooled on a chilled plate wrinkles when pushed, or until a thermometer reads 220F/105C at sea level. Overshooting gives a gummy, dark jelly; stopping short gives syrup.
- Why apple juiceStrained orange juice is low in pectin, so the apple juice supplies the set (citrus peel and pith, by contrast, are pectin-rich). Apple jelly juice is generally made from cooked whole apples including cores and peel; tart cooking apples give a firmer set than bland dessert varieties.
- Imperial measuresCassell's is a British book, so a pint is 20 fl oz and a quart 40 fl oz. Four pints of juice is about 2.3 litres; the quart of water for the syrup is about 1.1 litres.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar came as a hard refined cone that was broken up and was prized for boiling clear. Ordinary granulated or preserving sugar does the same job now, and 2 lb 8 oz is about 1.1 kg.
- SkimmingThe instruction to wipe the pan sides with a sponge is about clarity: it removes the scum thrown up by the boiling sugar, and sugar clinging above the syrup line can also seed graininess. A wet pastry brush works as well.
- The jelly bagLet it drip; do not squeeze, or the jelly clouds. Putting the pared orange rind in the bag infuses oil into the juice as it passes through, so take only the thin coloured zest with no white pith.
- Sugar ratioAt roughly 1 lb of sugar to 1.6 pints of juice this is leaner than a modern 1:1 preserve, so it needs longer boiling to set and will not keep as long. Expect a softer, more fruit-forward jelly.
- Yield and storageYield depends on how far the syrup is boiled down, so treat any jar count as approximate. Pot into hot sterilised jars, seal at once, and refrigerate after opening; at this sugar level treat it as a short-keeping preserve rather than a pantry item for the year.
Jellies of this kind belong to the era before commercial pectin, when the cook's pectin came from fruit itself, and apple was the standard neutral carrier for juices that would not set alone and mint and citrus jellies both lean on it in the same way. The syrup technique here, boiling and skimming sugar to a clear thick stage before the fruit goes in, is the confectioner's method: learn the sugar stages and every preserve, icing and candy follows. Loaf sugar itself dates the recipe, since refined sugar was still sold in hard cones to be cut with sugar nippers well into the late nineteenth century, and "loaf" in a recipe was generally taken to signal the purest grade available.