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Raspberries, White, Preserved Whole
Pick four pounds of raspberries, perfectly sound and dry, and take their weight in refined sugar. Set aside one pound of the sugar, powder and sift it, and boil the remainder to candy height. Put the raspberries very gently into this, and let them boil for five minutes, take them from the fire, and sprinkle the pound of sugar over them. Let them remain until cold, then put them again into the preserving-pan with another pound of powdered sugar and a pint of clear white currant juice, and let them boil gently until the fruit is clear. Remove the scum as it rises, and be very careful to take off the raspberries before they fall. Put them with a spoon one by one into jars, boil the syrup till the bubbles are large, pour it over them, and cover the jars in the usual way.
A whole-fruit preserve of the old school: the berries are candied in stages so they stay intact and translucent rather than collapsing into jam. Everything depends on handling them as little as possible.
- The hinge: "before they fall""Fall" means collapse — the berries slump and shed their seeds into the syrup. Watch them, not the clock, and lift them out the moment they turn clear and glassy; the syrup can be boiled down afterwards without them.
- Candy heightAn imprecise term even in its own day, and sources do not agree on exactly where it falls; it is generally taken as one of the higher stages of the old sugar ladder, above the ball stages. Sugar boiled that far will spit when damp fruit meets it, so put the berries in carefully.
- The sugar arithmetic does not add upYou are told to take 4 lb of sugar for 4 lb of fruit, then later to add "another pound" — 5 lb in all. Take the extra pound as intended; whole-fruit preserves need the heavy syrup to keep the berries plump rather than shrunken.
- White currant juiceThere for acid and pectin, and probably chosen over red so the pale fruit keeps its colour. Cassell's pint is an imperial one, 20 fl oz, about 2½ US cups. If white currants are unavailable, juice pressed from tart green apples does much the same work, though it dulls the clarity slightly.
- "Till the bubbles are large"The visual cue for a syrup boiled thick: large, slow, glossy bubbles replace the fast fine foam of a thin syrup. Roughly the neighbourhood of the usual setting point, though the book gives no temperature.
- Choosing the fruitWhite or yellow raspberries picked a shade underripe hold their shape far better than fully soft ones. They must be genuinely dry — surface water thins the syrup and encourages the berries to break.
- Powdered sugarHere it means granulated sugar ground fine, not modern confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch. Pulse granulated sugar briefly in a grinder or simply use superfine.
- Sealing"In the usual way" generally meant a paper round, often brandy-soaked, and a tied cover, relying on the sugar for keeping. For storage at room temperature, fill sterilised jars and process in a boiling water bath to current guidance; otherwise treat it as a refrigerator preserve.
White and yellow raspberries were a fixture of nineteenth-century kitchen gardens, valued less for flavour than for their pale, almost amber appearance under glass. The recipe belongs among the whole-fruit preserves, a class distinct from jam: the aim is intact berries suspended in a clear syrup, achieved by the laborious staged sugaring seen here, where the fruit is candied, rested, then finished. The use of white currant juice rather than red appears deliberate, since a red variety would have tinted the fruit and defeated the whole point of growing a white raspberry in the first place.