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Apple, Crab-apple or Quince Jelly
Cooked Fruit 4 cups (2 lbs.) Juice from bottle (scant 1/2 cup) CERTO Apple or Crab-apple: Remove stem and blossom ends from about 3 lbs. ripe fruit and cut in small pieces. Add 3 cups water; cover pan and simmer 10 minutes. Crush with masher, cover pan and simmer 5 minutes longer. Proceed as below. Quince: Remove core, blossom and stem ends from about 21½ lbs. ripe fruit. Put through food cutter, or chop very fine. Add 4 cups water and simmer in covered pan 15 minutes. Proceed as below.
This is the fruit-preparation half of a Certo jelly recipe; the sugar, boil time and sealing directions lived in the booklet's general instructions under "Proceed as below." Read it as a guide to extracting the juice, and take the finishing quantities from a current liquid-pectin insert.
- The recipe is incomplete as printedNo sugar quantity appears here, and with pectin jellies the sugar-to-juice ratio is what makes the set. Use the proportions on a modern bottle of liquid pectin for the juice volume you end up with.
- "Juice from bottle"This is the Certo, not fruit juice. A scant 1/2 cup is roughly half of the old 8 oz bottle. Modern liquid pectin comes in 3 oz pouches, so the measure does not transfer directly; go by the pouch directions.
- The quince weight"21½ lbs." is evidently a typographic garble, most plausibly for 2 1/2 lbs. The recipe's own heading calls for 4 cups of cooked fruit, so a quantity of that order is what is intended.
- Leave the skins and cores inApples and crab-apples are only stemmed and blossom-ended, not peeled or cored. Skin and core carry most of the natural pectin and much of the colour, and the pulp is strained out afterward.
- StrainingLadle the cooked pulp into a damp jelly bag or a colander lined with several layers of cheesecloth and let it drain undisturbed. Squeezing the bag forces fine pulp through and gives cloudy jelly.
- RipenessThe recipe specifies ripe fruit. With commercial pectin added, the fruit's own setting power matters less than it would in a long-boiled jelly; overripe fruit is generally avoided for flavour.
- SealingThe paraffin seal these booklets assumed is no longer recommended; it fails unevenly and lets mould in. Fill sterilised jars, seal with two-piece lids and process in a boiling-water bath per current guidance, or refrigerate and eat within a few weeks.
Certo, extracted commercially from apple pomace and citrus peel, was among the first liquid pectins sold in North America and was widely available to home cooks by the years after the First World War. Its selling point was speed: traditional jelly-making relied on long boiling to concentrate the fruit's own pectin, which darkened the colour and cooked away the fresh flavour, whereas added pectin let the boil be cut to a minute or two. The little recipe booklets given away with the bottle covered a wide range of fruits, including naturally pectin-rich ones such as crab-apple and quince. Quince has a long association with jelly — the word marmalade is generally traced to marmelo, the Portuguese for quince.