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Apple Jelly
(SAME RECIPE AS GRAPE) Loganberry Jelly from "Phez" 2 cups (1 pint) (1 pint) Juice-3 level cups Sugar 1/2 bottle (scant ½ cup) CERTO
This is a proportion table rather than a set of instructions: the book expects you to have read the grape jelly method a few pages earlier. The numbers are the recipe, and the ratio matters more than anything else here.
- The Certo method in briefCombined juice and sugar are brought to a full rolling boil, the liquid pectin is stirred in, and the mixture is boiled hard briefly (the booklets of this period specify around half a minute to a minute for jelly) before being skimmed and poured. The short boil is the point of added pectin; boiling on well past that drives off water, over-concentrates the sugar and can give a stiff, candied jelly.
- Bottle sizes have changedThe "bottle" of Certo in these booklets held roughly 8 fluid ounces, so a scant half cup is half a bottle. Liquid pectin now comes in foil pouches of 3 fluid ounces, two to a box, so measure the scant half cup by volume rather than counting packets.
- Sugar to juiceThree cups of sugar to two cups of juice looks extreme by modern jam habits but is normal for pectin-set jelly; the sugar is a setting agent, not just a sweetener. Reducing it will give syrup, not jelly, unless you use a pectin sold specifically for low-sugar work.
- Apple juice here means fresh pressedFor apple jelly the juice is the strained liquid from apples simmered with water, peels and cores included. Filtered supermarket apple juice has been clarified and often sweetened, and behaves differently.
- Apples already carry pectinTart underripe apples and crab apples set unaided, which is why older cookbooks give apple jelly no pectin at all. The Certo version trades that long reduction for a one-minute boil and a paler, fresher-tasting jelly with a much higher yield from the same fruit.
- Skip the paraffinBooklets of this period seal the glasses with a disc of melted paraffin wax. That method is no longer recommended, as the wax can crack or pull away and admit mould. Use two-piece lids and a boiling-water bath, or refrigerate and eat within a few weeks.
- YieldTwo cups of juice at these proportions gives roughly four cups of finished jelly, or about four half-pint jars.
- "Phez"A brand of bottled loganberry juice, not an ingredient you can buy today. The bracketed pint measures in the loganberry line restate the two cups as a pint.
Certo was liquid apple pectin sold in bottles from the 1910s and widely marketed through the 1920s, and the little recipe booklets that came with it were widely distributed cookery texts of the interwar years. Their purpose was to replace the old rolling boil, in which juice and sugar were reduced for half an hour or more until they sheeted off a spoon, with a fixed formula and a boil of a minute or less: more jelly from the same fruit, less guesswork about the set, and a much brighter colour. The stripped-down entries here, with one recipe cross-referenced to another and the ingredients reduced to three lines, show how far that standardisation went. Apple was the natural anchor of the series, since commercial pectin was itself extracted from apple pomace, the pressed residue of the cider trade. "Phez" was a brand of bottled Oregon loganberry juice of the period, and its appearance in the loganberry variant is a reminder that these booklets were as much about the packaged-goods economy as about the fruit harvest.