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Delicious Pineapple Jam from Canned Pineapple
4 level cups Pineapple 7½ level cups (3¼ lbs.) Sugar 1 bottle (scant cup) CERTO Use sliced or grated pineapple.
If sliced pineapple is used, put slices through food chopper or chop fine.
Mix the juice and chopped pineapple and measure 4 cups into large pan. If necessary add water to CERTO fill 4th cup. Add sugar, mix and bring to a vigorous boil, stirring constantly. Boil hard one minute. Remove from fire and stir in CERTO. Skim and pour quickly.
A liquid-pectin jam of the 1920s, built for speed: one minute of hard boiling instead of the long reduction older jams required. Two things in it no longer match current practice — the size of the pectin bottle and the point at which the pectin goes in.
- The Certo bottleThe original bottle held a scant cup, about 8 fl oz. Liquid pectin now comes in 3 fl oz pouches sold two to a box, so a full box (6 fl oz) is less than the recipe calls for. Use the sugar and fruit quantities printed on the insert in your box rather than scaling the old amount.
- Measure the fruit, not the canFour level cups of chopped pineapple with its juice is roughly two 20 oz cans, drained juice included. Crushed pineapple can be used straight from the can; sliced rings need chopping fine, and a food processor pulsed a few times does what the food chopper did.
- Sugar is structuralSeven and a half cups to four cups of fruit looks extreme, but high-methoxyl pectin will not gel without that sugar concentration. Reducing it gives pineapple syrup. If you want less sugar, use a low-sugar or no-sugar-needed pectin and its own directions.
- Pineapple and pectinThe recipe is written for canned pineapple. Fresh pineapple contains bromelain, a protease; it does not attack pectin, and canning heat deactivates it and softens the fibre. The quantities here assume the canned fruit and its juice.
- Vigorous boil means vigorousA boil that cannot be stirred down, with the whole surface rolling. Use a pan at least twice the volume of the contents — sugar syrup at full boil climbs fast.
- Filling and storage"Pour quickly" assumed hot glasses topped with melted paraffin, which is no longer recommended. Fill hot sterilised half-pint jars leaving 1/4 inch headspace and process in a boiling-water bath for 10 minutes, or skip the seal and refrigerate and use within a month.
- YieldAbout 10 to 11 cups, roughly ten to eleven half-pint jars (about 5½ pints).
Certo was among the first commercial liquid pectins sold to home cooks, appearing in the early twentieth century and promoted through small giveaway booklets like this one — the recipes exist to sell the bottle, which is why every one of them names it in capitals. Pectin itself had been isolated and named in the 1820s by the French chemist Henri Braconnot, but extracting it from apple pomace and citrus peel on an industrial scale only became a business in the early twentieth century, and its selling point was time: a minute of boiling instead of forty, with fresher colour and flavour and a far more predictable set. That this jam starts from canned pineapple is the other half of the period's story. Hawaiian canneries, generally credited to James Dole's operation from the first years of the century, had by the 1920s made pineapple a cheap pantry staple on the American mainland, available year-round to cooks who had never seen the fruit whole.