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Jams from Other Canned Fruits
2 cups CRUSHED Fruit or Fruit and Juice 31½ level cups (1/2 lbs.) Sugar ½ bottle (scant 1/2 cup) CERTO Crush fruit well. Measure crushed fruit and sugar into large saucepan and mix well.
Use hottest fire and stir constantly before and while boiling. Boil hard for 1 minute, remove from fire and stir in CERTO. Skim and pour quickly. Excellent jams and jellies may be made any time from Canned Fruits of all kinds: Cherry, Peach, Apricot, Pear, Plum, or Berries. Both fruit and juice may be combined for jam; or the juice may be used for jelly and the fruit for jam. Dried Fruit Jams from Figs, Apricots, Peaches, Etc. (Make Excellent Cake Fillings) 3 cups Prepared Fruit 6 level cups (2½ lbs.) Sugar 1 bottle CERTO Place 1/2 lb. dried fruit in quartjar and cover with 2 cups water. Let stand 4 hours. Drain off and save all the water or syrup to mix with pulp (makes 3 cups). Run through meat grinder or chop fine. Mix fruit and syrup well in kettle, then stir in CERTO and add sugar. Place on fire and stir constantly to prevent scorching. In stirring, carry the wooden spoon over the entire bottom of kettle. Bring to full boil and boil 1 minute. Remove from fire and pour into glasses. Note-Add juice of 1 lemon to fig recipe.
CERTO
Two short-boil pectin recipes from a Certo pamphlet, written for cooks working from a pantry of home-canned or dried fruit rather than fresh. The technique is the standard liquid-pectin sequence, and the timing is the whole method: one minute of hard boil, no more.
- Certo is liquid pectinThe recipe's own "1/2 bottle (scant 1/2 cup)" implies a full bottle of about 8 fl oz. Modern liquid pectin comes in pouches of about 3 fl oz, so two pouches (6 fl oz) is the nearest practical substitute for one old bottle, though it is not an exact match.
- The sugar figure in the first recipe is unclearThe sugar figure in the first recipe is garbled in printing -- It reads most plausibly as 3½ level cups (1½ lbs.), which matches the ratio in the second recipe on the same page (6 cups = 2½ lbs.). If in doubt, work from a current liquid-pectin chart.
- Order of operations differs between the twoIn the canned-fruit jam, sugar goes in first, the mixture is boiled hard one minute, and the pectin is stirred in off the heat. In the dried-fruit jam, the pectin goes in before the sugar and before heating. Follow each as written; with liquid pectin, adding it off the heat after a full rolling boil is the more reliable route to a set.
- "Hottest fire" and constant stirringHigh heat throughout, and a wooden spoon dragged across the whole base of the pan. Sugar-heavy fruit pulp scorches in seconds on a modern flat-bottomed pan over a strong burner, and scorch taints the entire batch.
- Canned fruit is already sweetenedCanned fruit may already be sweetened -- Fruit put up in heavy syrup will make a cloying jam if you add the full sugar, so taste the fruit before deciding. Note that the recipe itself permits fruit and juice to be used together.
- Dried fruit: soak and grinderHalf a pound of dried fruit soaked four hours in 2 cups water yields the 3 cups of pulp plus liquid the recipe specifies. A food processor pulsed to a coarse paste replaces the meat grinder. Figs are low in acid, which is why the note directs adding the juice of a lemon to that version.
- Sealing"Pour into glasses" meant tumblers topped with melted paraffin, which is no longer considered a sound seal. Use standard jars and process in a boiling-water bath, or treat the jam as a refrigerator preserve and use it within a few weeks.
- YieldThe first recipe makes roughly 4 half-pint jars; the dried-fruit version, built on a full bottle of pectin, makes about 8. The note about cake filling is worth taking seriously -- the ground dried-fruit jam is stiff enough to spread between layers.
Certo is generally counted among the earlier commercial pectin extracts sold to home cooks, and the little recipe booklets that came with it were pure instruction in a new technique: with added pectin, jam went from a long reducing boil to a single minute, which meant brighter colour, fresher flavour and a much larger yield from the same fruit. This page shows the sales argument pushed to its limit -- if pectin does the setting, the fruit need not even be fresh or in season. Canned peaches from last summer, or a half-pound of dried figs from the grocer's bin, become jam in an afternoon in February. That was a genuine change in how a household thought about preserving, which had until then been tied strictly to the weeks when fruit was ripe and cheap.