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Fruit Flavored Certo Jelly
Good but inexpensive Jellies can be made from any Bottled Fruit Syrup or any Bottled Fruit Juice by the following recipe. 1 cup Fruit Juice or Syrup-61½ level cups (24 lbs.) Sugar 2 cups Water 1 bottle (scant cup) CERTO
A frugal Prohibition-era jelly built on bottled syrup rather than fresh fruit, and the ingredient list has clearly suffered in printing. Read the proportions with care before you start.
- The garbled sugar figure"61½ level cups (24 lbs.)" is almost certainly a typesetting error. The likely intention is 6½ level cups of sugar, roughly 2¾ lb; 61½ cups against 1 cup of juice is not a jelly by any measure.
- What a bottle of Certo wasThe original glass bottle held about 8 fl oz, which is why the recipe glosses it as "a scant cup." Liquid pectin now sells in 6 fl oz bottles or twin packs of 3 fl oz pouches, so a single modern pouch is well short of what this formula assumes.
- No method is printed hereThe entry gives proportions only and assumes the reader already knows the general Certo procedure: combine juice, water and sugar, bring to a hard rolling boil, stir in the pectin, boil hard half a minute to a minute, remove from heat, skim, and pour at once.
- Pectin goes in lastThis is the hinge of every liquid-pectin recipe. Sugar and liquid are boiled first and the Certo is stirred in at the end, with only a short final hard boil; adding pectin early and boiling it long breaks down its setting power and you get syrup.
- Flavour is thin by designOne cup of bottled syrup diluted with two cups of water and nearly three pounds of sugar makes something closer to sweetened glass than fruit jelly. If you try it, use an intensely flavoured syrup and expect a mild result; that thinness was the point when fruit was dear.
- SealingBooklets of this era finished jelly under a layer of melted paraffin. That practice was abandoned because the wax cracks and lets mould in. Finish in sterilised jars with two-piece lids and a boiling-water bath instead.
Certo was the brand that put commercial fruit pectin into ordinary kitchens: an extract of apple pomace and/or citrus peel, bottled as a liquid, which let a cook set a jelly in minutes rather than boiling juice down for an hour and hoping. Its recipe booklets were given away with the bottle and served as the instruction manual, which is why entries like this one list proportions with little or no method. This particular formula is a thrift recipe rather than a fruit recipe. Bottled fruit syrups and juices were cheap, shelf-stable, and available year-round, and pectin meant they could be jellied without any fresh fruit at all. The high proportion of sugar to juice is not carelessness; sugar is what makes a pectin gel set, and the water is simply bulk.