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Conserves
Four pounds of fruit, three pounds of sugar, one pound of raisins, one pound of oranges. Put raisins and oranges through meat-grinder. Put all together and boil until jellied.
— Mrs. S. A. Holcomb
A conserve in this sense is a jam stretched with dried fruit and citrus, and the receipt is really a ratio rather than a set of instructions. Everything hinges on the endpoint: boil until it jellies, not until a clock says so.
- The gel point"Boil until jellied" means 220F (104C) at sea level, or roughly 8F above the boiling point of water where you are. A spoonful chilled on a cold saucer should wrinkle when pushed; a metal spoon should shed the last of it in a sheet rather than in drops.
- Which fruitThe receipt names none, and the reader was presumably expected to use whatever was on hand. Grapes, quince, peaches and plums are the usual candidates for a conserve of this type.
- The oranges go in wholeOne pound is roughly two to three medium oranges, peel and all, and the peel is the point: it carries the pectin and the bitterness that keeps the sugar in check. Discard the seeds before grinding, and check for a stray one afterward.
- Meat-grinderA food processor pulsed to a coarse mince does the same job. Do not puree the mixture, or the raisins and peel lose their texture and the conserve turns to paste.
- RaisinsPeriod raisins were often seeded muscats with more character than modern seedless Thompsons. Sultanas or a mix of dark and golden raisins comes closer than the standard supermarket box.
- The panThree pounds of sugar against four of fruit scorches easily once the mixture thickens. Use a wide, heavy pan filled no more than a third deep, and stir down to the bottom in the last ten minutes.
- Yield and keepingExpect roughly four to five pints. The receipt says nothing about sealing; jars of jam in this period were commonly covered with paraffin. Refrigerate the filled jars instead, or process them by current tested water-bath directions if you want them shelf-stable.
A conserve, as distinct from a jam or a jelly, is a preserve in which whole or chopped fruit is carried by sugar and padded out with dried fruit, citrus and often nuts. It belongs to a time when raisins and oranges were among the more reliably available out-of-season fruits in a village store, and adding them turned a glut of one summer fruit into something that tasted composed rather than plain. The whole ground orange also solved a technical problem quietly: peel and pith supply pectin, so a low-pectin fruit like a peach or a sweet grape will still set. Receipts like this one, signed by a contributor and reduced to three brief sentences, assume the reader already knows how a preserve behaves on the spoon, which is why no time is given anywhere in it.