Certo Recipes for Making Perfect Jellies and Marmalades

“Mother Nature's Jell Maker” — the 1922 leaflet that promised no more boiling the flavour away, with an exact recipe for every fruit.

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Orange Jelly, Orange and Lemon or Grapefruit Jelly

3 cups (13½ lbs.) Juice 7 level cups (3 lbs.) Sugar 1 bottle (scant cup) CERTO Use 12 oranges, or 10 oranges and 2 lemons, or 3 to 4 grapefruit, CERTO according to size.

Oranges and Lemons: Grate off yellow rinds. Cut up and crush meats and mix with grated rinds. Proceed as below.

Grapefruit: Grate off yellow rind, remove white rinds in quarters and discard. Cut up and crush meats and mix with grated rinds. Proceed as below.

For the Modern Kitchen

This is one entry in a Certo pamphlet where a single master method served a whole page of fruits, so the text breaks off at "proceed as below." What follows fills in the gaps and translates the units.

A Little History

Pectin was identified as the setting agent in fruit preserves in the early nineteenth century, but for most of the 1800s cooks relied on whatever pectin the fruit itself contained, which is why old preserving books lean so heavily on tart apples, currants and quinces and treat sweet oranges as difficult. Bottled apple-derived pectin, sold in the United States under the Certo name from around the end of the 1910s, changed the arithmetic: with the setting power supplied from a bottle, low-pectin fruits like orange and grapefruit became straightforward, and the boil dropped from a slow reduction of half an hour or more to a matter of seconds. The pamphlet this recipe comes from was promotional literature, distributed free with or near the product, and it is written in the compressed telegraphic style of such booklets s who preferher

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