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Apricot or Elderberry Jam
34 level cups CRUSHED Fruit 7 level cups (3 lbs.) Sugar ½ bottle (scant 1/2 cup) CERTO Apricot: Do not peel, but slice, pit and crush well about 2lbs. ripe fruit. Measure crushed fruit into large kettle and proceed as below.
Elderberry: Use about 2 lbs. ripe unstemmed berries. Stem and crush well. Measure crushed berries into large kettle, crush well . Measure crushed berries into large kettle, add 1/4 cup water stir until boiling, cover kettle and sim- Proceed as below. This jam sets slowly.
A short-boil pectin jam from a Certo booklet, written on the assumption that the reader already knows the standard method printed elsewhere in the book: bring fruit and sugar to a hard rolling boil, boil one minute, remove from heat, stir in the liquid pectin, skim, and pot.
- The fruit measure is unreliable as printed"34 level cups" is a garbled fraction. Comparable Certo formulas using 7 cups sugar to half a bottle call for somewhere in the region of 3½ cups crushed fruit. Weigh the 2 lb of fruit the recipe specifies and use whatever that yields rather than trusting the printed cup figure.
- Certo is liquid pectinCerto in this era is liquid pectin sold in glass bottles; the recipe's own "scant ½ cup" for a half bottle implies a full bottle of roughly 8 fl oz. Modern liquid pectin comes in foil pouches of 3 fl oz, which is the usual stand-in for the half bottle. Do not substitute powdered pectin, which is added at a different stage.
- Order mattersLiquid pectin goes in after the boil, off the heat. Adding it at the start, as powdered pectin requires, will break down the set.
- Elderberries and stemsThe 2 lb is weighed with stems on; strip every berry from the stem before crushing. Elder stems, leaves and green fruit contain cyanogenic compounds and should not go into the pot. Only fully ripe, dark berries are used, and they are always cooked.
- The elderberry pre-cookElderberries need the quarter cup of water and a covered simmer to soften skins and release juice before sugar is added; the printed text breaks off mid-word, so the simmering time is lost. Apricots go straight in, crushed and unpeeled -- the skins carry colour and some pectin.
- Slow set is normalSlow set -- The note that this jam sets slowly follows the elderberry directions and may apply to that fruit in particular. Give the sealed jars a week or two at room temperature before deciding the batch failed.
- YieldSealing -- Current practice is to process filled jars in a boiling-water bath for 10 minutes rather than sealing with paraffin, which the original booklets recommended.
Certo was introduced commercially in the 1910s after Douglas Pectin developed a bottled apple-pectin extract, and the little recipe booklets that came with the bottle taught a generation of home cooks the short-boil method: a brief hard boil instead of the long reduction that older jam-making required. That is why the fruit-to-sugar ratio here is so rigid and why the instructions read like a table -- the pectin does the setting, so the cook's only job is to hit the proportions and the one-minute boil. Pairing apricot with elderberry on one page is generally taken to reflect how these booklets were organised, by method rather than by season: two fruits that behave alike once crushed get a single set of numbers. Elderberry jam in particular was a thrift preserve, made from hedgerow fruit that cost nothing but the picking.