About the Book

Certo is concentrated fruit pectin, and this leaflet exists to sell it. Revised November 1922 — “Destroy Previous Editions” — and copyright by the Pectin Sales Co., Inc., of Rochester, New York.

Its pitch is worth understanding, because it changed how jam is made. Before bottled pectin you could only set jelly from fruits naturally rich in it, which meant using under-ripe, under-flavoured fruit and boiling it for up to three-quarters of an hour — boiling away the flavour and colour you were trying to keep. Certo let you use ripe fruit and a boil measured in minutes.

The recipes are therefore unusually exact for their date: level standard measuring cups, counted aloud, with the warning that one cup more or less will spoil the consistency.

This site reproduces the complete text of the original 1922 edition, digitized page by page from the original printing. The book is in the public domain.