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Raspberry and Currant Jelly
4 cups (2 lbs.) Juice from Cooked Fruit 8 level cups (3½ lbs.) Sugar 1 bottle (scant cup) CERTO Grape: Stem and crush thoroughly about 3 lbs.
Plum: Crush well about 436 lbs.
Add 1/2 cup water, stir until boiling, and simmer 10 minutes in closely covered saucepan. Proceed as on page 12.
Rhubarb: Cut in short lengths, without peel- CERTO ing, about 2½ lbs. red stalks. Add 1 cup water, heat slowly and stir until boiling; cover pan and simmer 15 minutes. Proceed as on page 12.
Raspberry and Currant: An even mixture is preferred. Use about 21/2 qts. or 3½ lbs. ripe fruit. Crush thoroughly, heat slowly with stirring, and bring fruit just to the boil. Proceed as on page 12. A Delicious
This is a liquid-pectin jelly, and the proportions are the hinge: 4 cups of strained juice to 8 cups of sugar to one bottle of Certo. Do not scale the sugar down, or the jelly will not set.
- Certo, then and nowCerto is liquid pectin. The bottle called for here held a scant cup, i.e. a little under 8 fl oz; modern liquid pectin comes in 3 fl oz pouches, and two pouches are the usual substitution for one old bottle.
- The missing methodPage 12 is not reproduced here. The standard liquid-pectin sequence is to mix juice and sugar in a large pot, bring to a full rolling boil, add the pectin all at once, boil hard for about a minute, then take it off the heat, skim the foam and pour.
- Getting the juiceCrush the berries and currants, heat gently just to a boil as directed, then drip through a damp jelly bag. Squeezing the bag pushes pulp through and gives a cloudy jelly.
- Fruit to juiceAbout 2½ quarts (3½ lb) of mixed raspberries and red currants yields roughly the 4 cups of juice the recipe needs. Stems and all go in; the straining removes them.
- Currants are the setting agentAn even mixture is specified for good reason. Red currants are high in natural pectin and acid, raspberries much lower, and the pair balances flavour against set.
- SealingPeriod practice was to pour into glasses and cap with melted paraffin. Current guidance is to fill sterilised half-pint jars to ¼ inch of the top, apply two-piece lids and process 5 minutes in a boiling-water bath.
- If it fails to setLiquid pectin jelly reaches its final texture within a day or two. Judge nothing in the first hours; a jelly that is still syrupy after 48 hours has usually been boiled too long or too briefly after the pectin went in.
Commercial liquid pectin, extracted from apple pomace, reached American kitchens in the years around the First World War, and Certo's own booklets like this one were the vehicle for teaching cooks to use it. The selling point was speed and certainty: a one-minute boil in place of the long reduction that traditional jelly-making required, with the set guaranteed by the added pectin rather than by luck and the ripeness of the fruit. Raspberry and currant is one of the oldest partnerships in the English jelly repertoire, the currant supplying the acid and pectin that raspberries lack, and it survived into the pectin era because the flavour combination was worth keeping even when the chemistry was no longer strictly necessary. Currants were affected during this period by state restrictions on Ribes plantings to check white pine blister rust — measures that bore most heavily on black currants, with red currants restricted in some states but not universally — which is part of why such recipes read as old-fashioned to American cooks today.