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Jellies from Surplus Canned Fruit Juices
1 cup Juice-2 cups Sugar Scant 1/3 cup CERTO Save the juices from your canned fruits for jellies.
This is a proportion rather than a method — the leaflet assumes you already know the Certo routine from the rest of the book. The ratio is sound; what it leaves out is the sequence and the timing, both of which matter with liquid pectin.
- The hinge: sugar and juice first, pectin lastMix juice and sugar, bring to a full rolling boil, then add the Certo and boil hard for about a minute before taking it off the heat (Certo leaflets of the period give anything from half a minute to a minute). Adding pectin at the start and cooking it a long time weakens its setting power, which is the usual reason a Certo jelly stays syrup.
- Scant 1/3 cup CertoA shade under 5 1/3 tablespoons, so call it 5. A modern 3 fl oz pouch of liquid pectin holds about 6 tablespoons, so one pouch covers this quantity with a little left over; in the United States liquid Certo is now sold in pouches rather than the bottle this was written for.
- Scale, but not indefinitelyPectin recipes are not reliable when multiplied up much. A large batch takes too long to reach a rolling boil and the set becomes unreliable. Make two batches instead of one large one.
- "Canned fruit juices" means the syrup in the jar"Canned fruit juices" most likely means the syrup drained from home-canned peaches, pears, plums or cherries rather than commercial juice. Because that syrup already contains sugar, the finished jelly will be sweeter than the ratio suggests, and pear or peach syrup is low in acid -- a little lemon juice improves both set and flavour.
- Do not cut the sugarLiquid pectin sets only in the presence of a high sugar concentration. A reduced-sugar version needs a pectin formulated for it, not this ratio.
- YieldOne cup of juice with two cups of sugar gives roughly 2 1/2 cups of jelly, or two to three half-pint jars.
- Sealing has changedBooks of this vintage finish jelly with a layer of melted paraffin. That is no longer recommended, as the wax can crack and admit mould. Fill hot sterilised jars, leave 1/4 inch headspace, and process in a boiling-water bath, or refrigerate and use within a month.
Certo is liquid fruit pectin, extracted commercially from apple pomace and citrus peel and sold in the United States from the 1910s by Douglas Pectin, and widely promoted through the 1920s; the promotional booklets that carried recipes like this one taught the short-boil method, in which sugar and juice are boiled only a minute rather than the long reduction that traditional jelly-making required. Its arrival changed what counted as a jelly-worthy fruit bsp; pears, peaches and sweet cherries have too little natural pectin to set on their own, and before bottled pectin their juices went to waste or into vinegar. That is exactly the thrift this page is selling: the syrup left in a jar of canned peaches was a by-product of the summer's preserving, and the leaflet offers a use for it rather than a recipe in the ordinary sense. Booklets of this kind were written to sell pectin, but they also reflect a household economy in which nothing drained off a jar of fruit was expected to go down the sink.