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Apricot, Elderberry or Guava Jelly
84 cups Juice from Cooked Fruit 1 bottle (scant cup) CERTO 8 level cups (314 lbs.) Sugar Apricot: Use about 31½ lbs. ripe fruit. Remove pits but do not peel. Crush well and add 1 cup water. Stir until boiling, cover pan and simmer 5 minutes.
Elderberry: Use about 3 lbs. ripe, unstemmed berries. Stem and crush thoroughly. Add 1 cup water, stir until boiling, cover pan and simmer 15 minutes. This jelly sets slowly. Guava: Slice thin about 3 lbs. ripe guavas. Add 3 cups boiling water and crush thoroughly for 5 minutes.
Place in cheese-cloth bag and squeeze out juice. Then drip juice through cotton flannel bag if a sparkling jelly is desired. Measure juice and then CERTO into large saucepan. Measure sugar in separate pan. Bring juice and CERTO just to a boil and begin to add sugar slowly with constant stirring, taking about 5 minutes to add sugar, and keeping juice nearly at the boil. Then bring to full boil for 1/2 minute. Remove from fire, skim, and pour quickly.
A Certo-era jelly formula from the years when liquid pectin was sold in an eight-ounce bottle and the sugar was stirred in gradually rather than all at once. The proportions still work, but the pectin package and the sealing practice have both changed.
- The pectin bottleA "bottle (scant cup)" of Certo was roughly 8 fluid ounces. Liquid pectin now comes in 3-ounce (6 tablespoon) pouches, two to a box; two pouches (6 fluid ounces) are the usual stand-in for the old bottle, though they fall short of it by about two ounces. Do not substitute powdered pectin here; it is added at a different stage and in different proportion.
- Sugar by weightEight level cups of granulated sugar weighs about 3 lb 4 oz. Weighing is more reliable than cup measure, and the sugar quantity is not adjustable in a pectin jelly of this type.
- The fruit weightsEach variant starts from roughly 3 to 3 1/2 lb of fruit. The juice measurement at the head of this copy is illegible, so measure the juice you actually get and work from that figure rather than assuming the fruit gave the intended volume.
- The sugar-adding methodThe slow five-minute addition with the juice held just below the boil is the hinge of the old Certo procedure: it dissolves the sugar without dropping the mixture off the boil. Current liquid-pectin practice reverses it, bringing sugar and juice to a rolling boil first and adding pectin last. Whichever you follow, follow it whole; mixing the two sequences gives a syrup that will not set.
- The half-minute boilOnce all the sugar is in, the full rolling boil is brief by design. Overboiling drives off water, concentrates the sugar past the pectin's working range, and produces a stiff, sticky jelly rather than a clean set.
- ElderberriesStems and leaves contain cyanogenic compounds and should be removed completely; only the ripe berries go in the pan. Elderberry juice is also low in acid, which may be behind the book's warning that the jelly sets slowly. Many current elderberry jelly recipes add lemon juice, on the order of 1/4 cup per four cups of fruit juice, to bring the pH into range.
- Guava and the second strainingThe cotton flannel bag is an old jelly-bag material; a double thickness of undyed muslin or a jelly bag does the same job. Let it drip on its own. Squeezing after the first extraction pushes pulp through and clouds the jelly.
- Sealing and yieldExpect roughly ten to eleven half-pint jars. Booklets of this period generally assumed paraffin poured over the surface in glasses; use two-piece lids and process the filled jars in a boiling water bath instead (current guidance runs from 5 to 10 minutes, adjusted for altitude), as paraffin seals are no longer considered reliable against mould.
Certo was the household face of commercial pectin, the substance chemists learned to extract from apple pomace and citrus peel in usable quantity in the early twentieth century. Before it, jelly-making depended on the fruit's own pectin, which meant long boiling, guesswork with the sheeting test, and outright failure with low-pectin fruit. Booklets of this kind were distributed by the manufacturer. Apricot and elderberry both set poorly on their own; guava, by contrast, is comparatively rich in pectin and will jell unaided. The short boil was a selling point, since it preserved fresh fruit colour and flavour that a long open-kettle boil destroyed, and the fixed sugar-to-juice ratio turned jelly from a matter of judgement into a matter of measurement.