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General Directions for Foregoing Jellies
Place fruit in cheese-cloth bag and squeeze out juice. Then drip juice through cotton flannel bag if a sparkling jelly is desired. Measure sugar and juice into large saucepan, stir and bring to a boil. At once add CERTO, stirring constantly and bring again to a FULL BOIL for 1/2 minute. Remove from fire, let stand 1 minute, skim, and pour quickly. (NOTE: With Peach Jelly 20 drops Almond Extract, added after skimming, strengthens and improves the flavor.) Red or Black Currant Jelly 4½ cups (24 lbs.) Juice from Cooked Fruit 7½ level cups (314 lbs.) Sugar ½ bottle (scant 1/2 cup) CERTO Crush well about 31/½ lbs. ripe fruit. Add 1 cup water, stir until boiling, cover pan and simmer 10 minutes. Place in jelly bag Measure juice into large saucepan. and squeeze out juice.
Measure sugar in separate pan. Bring juice just to boil and begin to add sugar slowly, with constant stirring, taking about 5 minutes to add sugar, keeping juice nearly at boil. Then bring to boil and at once add CERTO, stirring constantly, and bring again to a full boil for 1/2 minute. Remove from fire, let stand 1 minute, skim and pour quickly.
CERTO JELLY- 2½ cups (14 lbs.) Water 1 bottle (scant cup) CERTO Measure sugar and water into large saucepan, stir, and bring to a boil. At once add CERTO, stirring constantly, and bring again to a full boil for half minute. Take from fire, let stand 1 minute, skim and pour quickly.
For a tart jelly add the juice of 1 lemon to above recipe. The grated rind will give lemon flavor if desired.
Coca Cola or Ginger Ale Jelly: Use these or any similar beverages instead of water in plain CERTO recipe.
CERTO Jelly of several flavors may be made CERTO from one bottle by adding to the glasses, before filling, a few drops of various Flavoring Extracts: Orange, Lemon, Almond, Maple, etc., or any true fruit flavor. For Ginger Jelly use Candied Ginger, cut fine. Fruit Juice left over from canning may be used in place of all or part of the water in CERTO Jelly recipe.
These are the master directions behind the whole Certo jelly section: extract juice, boil with sugar, add liquid pectin, boil hard for thirty seconds, pour. The proportions are fixed chemistry rather than cooking to taste, so the measuring matters more than the judgement.
- The half-minute full boilThe hinge of the method is that second boil after the pectin goes in: a full rolling boil that cannot be stirred down, timed for exactly 30 seconds. Under-boiling leaves syrup; boiling much longer breaks the pectin set and darkens the colour.
- What a bottle of Certo wasThe bottle called for here held about 8 fluid ounces, which is why the text glosses one bottle as a "scant cup" and half a bottle as a scant half cup. Certo is now sold as foil pouches of roughly 3 fluid ounces, so measure by volume in cups rather than counting pouches.
- Sugar is structuralLiquid pectin sets only in a narrow band of sugar concentration and acidity. Reducing the sugar in these ratios will not give a softer jelly, it will give none at all; a recipe written for low-sugar or no-sugar pectin is the only way to cut it.
- The jelly bagCheesecloth for the first squeeze, then a second drip through flannel for clarity. If you want a genuinely sparkling jelly, let the bag drip untouched — pressing it forces pulp through and clouds the result.
- Currant quantitiesThe currant jelly starts from about 3½ lb of ripe fruit crushed with 1 cup water, simmered 10 minutes, to yield 4½ cups juice, which is then set with 7½ cups sugar (about 3¼ lb) and half a bottle of Certo. Adding the sugar slowly over five minutes with the juice near boiling simply keeps it dissolving without scorching.
- Plain Certo jellyThe water-and-sugar version is a flavoured pectin gel rather than a fruit preserve — the flavour comes entirely from the extract, ginger, lemon or soft drink you add. If you use a carbonated beverage, expect heavy foaming as it heats; a deep pan and a wide skimmer help.
- Sealing and storagePeriod practice was to pour into glasses and seal with paraffin wax, which is no longer recommended for any preserve. Use standard canning jars with two-piece lids and follow a current guide for boiling-water processing times, or refrigerate and eat within a few weeks.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield figure; from 4½ cups juice, 7½ cups sugar and half a bottle of Certo a batch of this size fills a good many small glasses. Have jars washed, hot and lined up before the pectin goes in, since "pour quickly" means within a minute or two of skimming.
Certo was one of the first commercial liquid pectins sold to home cooks, an apple-derived extract that let a jelly set in minutes rather than by long boiling and guesswork with the sheet test. Booklets like this one were promotional literature: the company supplied the recipes precisely because the product only works at fixed ratios of juice, sugar and pectin, and a cook improvising with an old family method would get syrup and blame the bottle. The result is a distinctive style of preserving — short boils, bright colour, high yield — and a set of novelty entries, ginger ale and Coca-Cola jelly among them, that show how quickly a technical ingredient gets pushed past fruit into whatever sweet liquid is on the shelf.