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Strawberry Jelly
Take quite fresh fruit which has been gathered in dry weather. Pick the stalks from it, put it into a preserving-pan (an enamelled one is the best for the purpose), and place it by the side of a clear fire that the juice may be drawn gently from it. As soon as this flows freely, simmer it until the berries appear to collapse, but on no account allow the juice to remain on the fire till it thickens. Pour the fruit upon a well-scalded but dry sieve, and let the juice drain thoroughly from it; strain the liquor through three or four thicknesses of muslin, and weigh it. Boil quickly for twenty minutes, and stir frequently. Take the pan from the fire, and then add very gradually fourteen ounces of coarsely-pounded loaf sugar for each pound of juice. Let one portion be dissolved before another is added. When all the sugar is dissolved, put the pan again on the fire, and boil the jelly until a little put upon a plate will stiffen. Pour the jelly into small jars, cover these in the usual way, and store in a cool dry place. Time to boil the jelly with the sugar, a quarter of an hour or more, according to the quality of the fruit. Probable cost, strawberries, from 4d. to 8d. per pound; less if bought by the peck.
A straight juice-and-sugar jelly with no added pectin, which is the whole difficulty: strawberries are among the lowest-pectin fruits in the kitchen, so the set depends entirely on hard boiling and luck with the fruit.
- Expect a soft setStrawberry juice alone carries very little pectin and only moderate acid, so this will often finish as a thick syrup rather than a firm jelly. Underripe berries help; if you want reliability, a modern strawberry jelly recipe with added pectin and lemon juice is the honest answer.
- Drawing the juice"By the side of a clear fire" means gentle, indirect heat — the lowest burner setting, or a heatproof bowl over simmering water. The point is to sweat the juice out without boiling it down, since reducing at this stage darkens the colour and dulls the flavour.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in a hard cone and broken up for use. Ordinary granulated white sugar is the direct substitute; there is no need to pound it, and no advantage to preserving sugar here.
- Weighing the juiceThe proportion is by weight, not volume: 14 oz sugar to each 1 lb (16 oz) of strained juice — about 400 g sugar per 450 g juice. A pound of juice is roughly 2 cups. Weigh it; guessing by volume throws the ratio off.
- Adding sugar off the heatDissolving the sugar away from the fire, in stages, is sound practice and worth keeping. Undissolved crystals on the pan bottom scorch and can seed crystallisation in the finished jars.
- The setting test"A little put upon a plate will stiffen" is the wrinkle test: chill a saucer, drop on a teaspoon of jelly, wait a minute, push it with a fingertip. On a thermometer, jelly point is 220F (104C) at sea level.
- Enamelled panAn enamelled preserving pan was presumably specified to avoid the metallic taint that fruit acid draws from copper or iron. Stainless steel does the same job; use the widest pan you have, since evaporation speed is what gets you to setting point before the flavour cooks away.
- "Cover in the usual way"In Victorian practice that generally meant a paper disc laid on the surface of the jelly and a cover tied down over the jar. Current guidance is to fill sterilised jars, seal with two-piece lids and process in a boiling water bath, or simply refrigerate and use within a few weeks.
- Yield and costA peck is a dry measure of two gallons, in the region of 10 to 12 lb of berries — the book is noting the bulk-buying discount at market.
Cassell's separates jelly from jam with some care: jam uses the crushed fruit, jelly only the strained juice, and the labour of scalded sieves and four thicknesses of muslin exists purely to get a clear, jewelled preserve on a middle-class breakfast table. The recipe belongs to the moment just before pectin became a commodity — the substance had been named by the French chemist Braconnot in the 1820s, but bottled and powdered pectin for domestic use did not reach kitchens until the early twentieth century, so the cook here has nothing to lean on but boiling time and the "quality of the fruit", a phrase doing a great deal of quiet work. The costing in pence per pound, with a discount by the peck, is a price for fruit rather than sugar; the wider context is a Britain in which the sugar duties had been repealed in 1874, and sugar was cheap enough that preserving fruit at home became a routine summer chore rather than a luxury.