Jellies
Currants, crab-apples, cranberries, and grapes, not too ripe, make nice jelly by stewing well in water enough to just cover. When done hang in a jelly bag to drain. Let the clear juice boil fifteen or twenty minutes. Meanwhile heat the sugar, measure for measure, and turn into the juice. Boil up, stirring to be sure the sugar is dissolved, and remove from fire immediately.
A general method rather than a fixed formula: four high-pectin fruits, an equal volume of sugar, and a short final boil. The whole thing hinges on using fruit that is slightly underripe, since that is where the pectin and acid live.
- Why "not too ripe" mattersPectin and acid both fall as fruit ripens, and this recipe carries no added pectin. Currants, crab-apples, cranberries and slightly green grapes are chosen precisely because they set on their own; fully ripe fruit will give you syrup.
- Measure for measureMost likely sugar equal in volume to the strained juice, though the recipe does not specify. A cup of juice to a cup of sugar is roughly 8 oz juice to 7 oz sugar, a standard old-style jelly ratio that still works.
- Heating the sugarWarming the sugar before it goes in means it dissolves the moment it hits the juice and the boil is not knocked back. The recipe gives no method or temperature. Useful, though not essential with a heavy pan.
- The jelly bagA double thickness of damp cheesecloth in a colander, or a dampened pillowcase, does the same job. Let it drip without squeezing or pressing: forcing the pulp through gives a cloudy jelly that no amount of later skimming will clear.
- Judging the setThe recipe gives no test. After the sugar dissolves and the mixture comes back to a hard boil, look for 220F on a candy thermometer at sea level, or for the syrup to fall from a spoon in a sheet rather than in drops. "Remove from fire immediately" is sound advice; overcooked jelly turns gummy and dark.
- The long first boilFifteen to twenty minutes of boiling the plain juice concentrates it before the sugar goes in. With very juicy fruit this is worth doing; with crab-apples, which give a thicker extract, watch that it does not reduce so far that the finished jelly is stiff.
- Yield and storageRoughly 4 cups of juice with 4 cups of sugar gives about four to five half-pint jars, depending how far the juice was reduced. The original says nothing about sealing them. Either refrigerate and use within a month, or follow a current water-bath canning procedure for tested processing times if you intend to store the jars on a shelf.
Jelly recipes of this kind belong to the era before commercial pectin, when the cook's whole skill lay in choosing fruit that would set unaided. The four fruits named here are classics of the American jelly cupboard: currants and crab-apples were common dooryard crops on nineteenth-century farms, cranberries came from the New England bogs, and underripe grapes could come from thinning the vines. Commercial liquid pectin reached home kitchens around 1918, with powdered pectin following later, and gradually made the equal-measure, boil-and-watch method optional; before that, a household compendium like this one could simply list the reliable fruits and trust the reader to know that a clear jelly meant an unsqueezed bag and a short final boil.