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GENERAL DIRECTIONS FOR ABOVE JAMS (Add sugar and mix well Use) (II)
Add sugar and mix well. Use hottest fire and stir constantly before and while boiling. Boil hard for 1 minute; except RHUBARB which should be boiled 3 minutes. Remove from fire and stir in Certo.
Skim and pour quickly. (Note: with Peach Jam, 20 drops Almond Extract, added after skimming improves the flavor.)
This page is the shared method for a group of jam recipes earlier in the booklet, so it assumes you already have crushed fruit and sugar measured out. The sequence it describes is still the correct one for liquid pectin.
- Certo means liquid pectinCerto in this booklet is liquid pectin, still sold under that name in some markets. The amount is set by the individual fruit recipes, not by this page. Powdered pectin is not a substitute here: powder is stirred into the fruit before the sugar and before boiling, which is the opposite of these directions.
- The hinge: add pectin off the heatThe pectin goes in after the pan leaves the burner, as written. Prolonged further boiling after the pectin is added can weaken the set.
- "Hottest fire" and "boil hard"Highest burner setting, and a full rolling boil that cannot be stirred down, not a lively simmer. The one minute is counted from the moment that boil is reached, not from when bubbles first appear at the edge.
- Why rhubarb gets three minutesThe recipe singles rhubarb out for three minutes rather than one but does not say why; rhubarb is fibrous and watery, which is the likely reason. Do not extend the time for other fruits to compensate for a soft set.
- Stir constantly, and mind the panA sugar-heavy mixture at a hard boil scorches in seconds on the bottom. Use a wide, heavy pan no more than half full, since the boil climbs fast.
- Skim and pour quicklyLiquid pectin begins to set as the jam cools, so skim the foam once and fill jars immediately. A half teaspoon of butter added to the fruit before boiling is the usual way to reduce foaming.
- Almond extract measureTwenty drops is roughly a quarter teaspoon. Add it after skimming, off the heat, so the flavour does not cook off.
- Sealing has changedThis page does not cover sealing, and jam booklets of the pectin era commonly directed a paraffin cap, which current practice has abandoned as unreliable. Fill clean hot jars, leave a quarter inch of headspace, and process in a boiling-water bath following a current canning guide, or refrigerate and use within a few weeks.
Certo was one of the first commercial pectin extracts sold to home cooks, and booklets like this one existed to teach a method that overturned generations of practice. Traditional jam-making relied on long boiling to concentrate the fruit's own pectin, which cost you colour, volume and fresh flavour; with a bottled extract the boil could be cut to a single minute, and the manufacturers' recipes accordingly call for far more sugar and far less time than a nineteenth-century preserving book. Pectin itself was identified in the early nineteenth century and is generally credited to the French chemist Henri Braconnot, but it did not reach domestic kitchens as a bottled product until the early twentieth. The rigid one-minute timing, the insistence on the hottest fire and the warning to pour quickly all reflect a company teaching an unfamiliar chemistry to cooks who had been taught to judge a set by eye.