Home › The Recipes › Mint Jelly
Mint Jelly
Measure water, add 1 teaspoon coloring and stir until dissolved. (If fresh leaves are used add about 1 cupful to the water CERTO and remove finally when skimming.) Add strained lemon juice and sugar 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 and if fresh leaves were not used, add 1 teaspoon Spearmint Extract. Let stand 1 minute, skim, and pour quickly. Do not forget you can make delicious jellies and jams all winter from Bottled Juices and Canned Fruits. See recipes on pages 8 and 14.
This is a page from a pectin-maker's booklet, and it assumes you have the quantity table that went with it. Read the two structural notes first, because the printed text alone will not get you to a set jelly.
- The quantities are missingThe verbatim text gives no amounts for water, lemon juice, sugar or CERTO — only the 1 teaspoon of coloring and 1 teaspoon of extract. Follow the ratio chart on the insert of a current bottle of liquid pectin rather than guessing; jelly set depends on the sugar-to-liquid-to-pectin proportion being close to exact.
- CERTO is liquid pectinIt is still sold under that name in the UK, Canada and the US (labelled liquid fruit pectin). It is not interchangeable with powdered pectin: liquid goes in after the sugar boil, powder goes in before. Swapping one for the other in this method gives syrup.
- The hinge: 30 seconds, hard"A full boil for 1/2 minute" means a rolling boil that cannot be stirred down, timed from the moment it returns. Straying far either side of the half minute can leave the jelly loose. Watch a clock rather than the pan.
- Work fast at the endLiquid pectin jelly begins to set within a few minutes of coming off the heat. The one-minute stand and quick skim exist to clear foam before that happens, so have jars warm and lined up before you start boiling.
- Fresh leavesAbout a cupful means loosely packed spearmint or garden mint, added to the water and lifted out with the foam at the skimming stage; the text says nothing about bruising or a separate steeping. If you use leaves you skip the extract.
- The coloringA whole teaspoon of coloring (green, by convention for mint jelly, though the text does not say so) is far more than a modern cook would use. A few drops of modern liquid color, or a couple of drops of gel, gives the same effect.
- SealingThe booklet era finished jars with melted paraffin. That is no longer recommended, as mold grows in the gaps that form as the wax contracts. Use two-piece lids and either process in a boiling-water bath per current guidance or keep the jelly in the refrigerator and eat it within a month.
- YieldThe page gives no quantities, so no yield can be read from it; work to whatever the pectin chart you follow states. Do not double a batch; large batches of pectin jelly reach the boil unevenly and set poorly.
Mint jelly belongs to the British tradition of a sharp sweet condiment with roast lamb, where mint sauce came first and the jelly is often said to be the tidier descendant of it. What makes this version a period document is CERTO: bottled apple pectin, generally traced to the American commercialization of extracted pectin in the years around the First World War, and marketed hard through small free booklets exactly like this one. Before bottled pectin, a clear mint jelly meant simmering tart apples or crab apples for their own pectin and juice, then straining through a jelly bag overnight. The manufacturer's promise was that pectin uncoupled jelly-making from the fruit harvest altogether.