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Grape or Quince Jam
Grape: Use about 3 lbs. ripe grapes. Separate skins from pulp, halving the skins. Simmer pulp 5 minutes in covered pan and remove seeds by screening through sieve. Crush skins and mix with screened pulp. Add 1/2 cup water, stir until boiling and simmer slowly 1/2 hour in closely CERTO 1/2 hour in closely CERTO covered pan. Measure 4 level cups cooked fruit into large kettle, adding water, if necessary, to fill 4th cup. Quince: Use about 3 lbs. Peel, remove stem and blossom ends, and core. Put through food chopper, or chop very fine. To about 3½ cups chopped fruit add 1 cup water and juice 1 and juice 1 lemon. Stir until boiling and simmer 1/4 hour in covered pan. Measure 4 level cups cooked fruit into large kettle, adding water, if necessary, to fill 4th cup.
This is the fruit-preparation half of a Certo jam recipe: the booklet's standard formula supplied the sugar, the pectin and the one-minute boil separately, and the text as printed here breaks off before them. Treat it as instructions for getting 4 cups of prepared fruit, then follow a current pectin recipe for the finishing.
- The recipe is incompleteBoth versions stop at "measure 4 level cups cooked fruit into large kettle." No sugar quantity, no Certo quantity and no boiling time are given, and the grape method has an obvious typesetting stutter ("1/2 hour in closely CERTO covered pan"). Sugar-to-fruit ratio is what makes a pectin jam set, so use the ratio printed on the pectin you actually buy.
- CertoCerto is liquid fruit pectin, still sold. Liquid and powdered pectin are not interchangeable and are added at different points — liquid goes in after the sugar boil, powder before it. Older booklets measured Certo by the bottle, and bottle sizes have changed since, so never scale by "one bottle" — go by the quantity printed on the pectin you buy.
- Slipping grape skinsThe skin-and-pulp separation is for slip-skin American grapes — Concord, Niagara, Catawba — where the pulp pops out under thumb pressure. Seedless table grapes have skins that cling and need no separation, and they are low in acid and pectin, which will affect the set.
- "Screening through sieve"Press the simmered pulp through a medium sieve or food mill to strip the seeds; a chinois is too fine and will hold back the flesh you want. Do not use a blender first, as crushed grape seeds turn the jam bitter.
- Quince prepQuinces are hard enough to be a knife hazard; quarter them with a heavy blade on a stable board. The flesh browns fast, so drop the chopped fruit into the lemon-and-water mixture as you go. A food processor pulsed in short bursts replaces the food chopper.
- The lemon is not for flavourQuince is high in pectin but the lemon juice supplies acid, which pectin needs to gel. Do not omit it, and use fresh juice rather than reconstituted for reliable acidity.
- Measuring the fruit"4 level cups cooked fruit" is the whole point of the exercise — pectin recipes are proportion-driven, so top up with water to reach exactly four cups rather than guessing.
- SealingBooklets of this era finished jars with a layer of melted paraffin. That is no longer recommended: the wax seal can crack and admit mould. Use two-piece lids and a boiling-water bath at the time given by current guidance for your jar size and altitude.
- YieldThree pounds of fruit reduced to four cups will give roughly six to eight half-pint jars once sugar is added, depending on the formula you finish with.
Certo was one of the first commercial fruit pectins, extracted from apple pomace and citrus peel and sold in liquid form from the early twentieth century, and the little recipe booklets given away with it did more than sell pectin — they reorganised home preserving. Before standardised pectin, a cook judged the set by eye, testing a spoonful on a cold plate and boiling long enough to concentrate the fruit's own pectin, which meant long cooking, darkened colour and unpredictable results. Pectin recipes replaced judgement with proportion: measure exactly four cups of fruit, add exactly so much sugar, boil exactly one minute. That is why this page is written the way it is, as a preparation of a measured volume rather than a dish. Grapes and quinces are an instructive pair to put side by side: quince is so rich in natural pectin that European cooks had long used it to make solid pastes — the Portuguese marmelo behind the word marmalade — while slip-skin grapes need the skins worked back in for both colour and body. Both were common dooryard fruits in North America when these booklets circulated, and quince in particular was a fruit almost nobody ate raw and almost everybody preserved.