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RASPBERRIES, PRESERVED (another way)
Take four pounds of raspberries picked from the stalks, set aside at least half, which should be the finest, add to the rest one pound of white currants, and bruise and strain them through a cloth, wringing it so as to extract all the juice. Put the juice into a preserving-pan, and allow three-quarters of a pound of sugar to every pound of juice, including the weight of the raspberries left whole. Let the sugar and juice boil, skimming it, and at the end of twenty minutes put in the rest of the fruit, and let it boil for ten minutes longer. When the preserve is boiled enough--it is if the syrup jellies when a little is put on a plate to cool--take it off the fire, and pot in the usual way.
A whole-fruit raspberry preserve that gets its set from currant juice rather than long boiling, which is why the berries stay recognisable. Two things need translating: the sugar arithmetic, and what "pot in the usual way" assumed.
- The hinge: the currants are the pectinRaspberries are only moderate in pectin, so a raspberry-only preserve tends to stay loose unless it is boiled until the fruit collapses. The pound of white currants adds pectin (the raspberries already bring acid of their own); do not leave them out. Red currants should set just as well, though they will darken the colour. If currants are unavailable, a commercial pectin recipe is the better route than guessing.
- Reading the sugar calculationWeigh the strained juice, then add the weight of the reserved whole raspberries to it, and take three-quarters of that combined figure in sugar. With 2 lb of berries held back, expect roughly 1 lb 8 oz to 2 lb of juice, so about 2 lb 10 oz to 3 lb of sugar in total. Weigh rather than measure by volume.
- Three-quarter sugar is a soft setThe sugar is three-quarters the weight of the juice plus the reserved whole berries, which is below the near equal-weight ratio of a standard modern jam. Expect a fresher-tasting, looser preserve that is less stable once opened. Treat it as a fridge preserve after opening and use it within a few weeks.
- TimingsTwenty minutes of boiling for the juice alone, then ten minutes with the whole berries; the effect is that the reserved fruit is cooked only briefly. A steady boil keeps the times as written; a lazy simmer extends them and dulls both colour and flavour.
- The plate test, with a thermometer as backupChill two saucers in the freezer first, drop on a teaspoonful, wait 30 seconds and push it with a fingertip: it should wrinkle. A jam thermometer reading 220F at sea level tells you the same thing. Pull the pan off the heat while you test.
- Straining and skimmingWringing crushed fruit in a cloth gives a fuller yield than letting it drip, at the cost of a slightly cloudy juice, which matters little here. Skim the scum as it rises during the first boil rather than at the end; a small knob of butter stirred in near the finish will disperse most of what is left.
- "Pot in the usual way"For a Victorian cook this meant filling hot jars and covering with a waxed disc and a paper cover tied down. Current practice is hot, clean half-pint jars filled to a quarter-inch headspace and processed in a boiling-water bath for 10 minutes, or else refrigerated and eaten within a month.
- YieldOn the order of 4 to 5 lb of finished preserve, depending on how much juice the cloth yields.
Cassell's gave more than one raspberry preserve, and this "another way" is the one that solves a problem every Victorian preserver knew by taste rather than by chemistry: raspberry jam on its own is either runny or overcooked. Pairing the berries with currants was the standard workaround long before commercial pectin was sold, and the same logic sits behind lemon juice added to strawberries. White currants were sometimes said to be the better choice, since they carry the same setting power without staining the raspberry colour brownish. The instruction to hold back "at least half, which should be the finest" berries is a fruiterer's habit as much as a cook's: the bruised and small fruit goes into the juice, the handsome fruit stays whole and visible in the jar.