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Grape or Currant Jelly
Wash and pick over Fruit. Crush in kettle one layer at a time and boil, stirring frequently, until juice is extracted from pulp. Let drip through double piece of cheese cloth, rinsed in cold water, over night or till juice no longer drips. Do not squeeze. To 1 tablespoon juice add 1 tablespoon alcohol; stir and let stand 10 minutes. If 2/3 of the mixture is cloudy use 2/3 cup sugar to each cup juice. If all is cloudy use equal parts sugar and juice. (This is called the Pectin Test.) Be sure that juice mixed with alcohol is discarded immediately. Measure remaining juice into kettle, bring to boiling point, add required amount of sugar and cook to 220 degrees F. or until mixture will show two distinct, firm drops when dripped from side of spoon, or when small amount will become firm when dropped on very cold saucer. Then skim and pour into sterilized glasses.
Second Extraction Return fruit pulp to kettle, add barely enough cold water to cover it, bring slowly to boiling point, stirring to prevent burning on; cook 5 minutes, drain and finish as for first extraction, boiling 5 minutes before adding the sugar. Third Extraction Proceed as for second extraction. Oftentimes the juice from second and third extractions may be combined before being made up into jelly. By making three extractions the amount of jelly obtainable from a given amount of fruit may be almost doubled.
A careful early-20th-century method that treats jelly as a matter of measurement rather than luck. Two things carry the recipe: the alcohol pectin test, which tells you how much sugar to use, and the finishing temperature.
- The alcohol test, and why it must be thrown outThe alcohol is not meant as a drinking spirit; period instructions call variously for grain, denatured, or rubbing alcohol. It precipitates pectin into visible clots so you can judge how much is present. The tested sample is discarded, never tasted, and if denatured or rubbing alcohol is used it is poisonous. Use a separate spoon and glass, and keep it away from the pot.
- Reading the clotsMore pectin means more sugar can be carried without a runny set. Fully clotted juice takes sugar and juice in equal volume; partly clotted juice takes about two-thirds. Modern equivalent: pick fruit slightly underripe, since pectin drops sharply as grapes and currants soften.
- 220F is sea-level adviceJelly sets at roughly 8F above the boiling point of water where you are. Boil plain water first, read your thermometer, add 8F, and use that number. At 3,000 feet the target is nearer 214F.
- The spoon test"Two distinct, firm drops" describes the sheet test: the syrup gathers into drops at the side of the spoon that run together and fall away in a sheet rather than in separate streams. Some cooks find the cold-saucer test easier to read: chill several saucers in the freezer and take the pot off the heat while you test.
- Do not squeeze the bagPressing the pulp forces fine solids through and gives cloudy jelly. Rinsing the cloth in cold water first keeps it from absorbing juice.
- Second and third extractionsThese are weaker in pectin and acid, and the recipe has you finish them as for the first extraction, which means testing again. The second and third runs may be combined and made up as one batch, as the recipe suggests. Expect a softer, paler jelly than the first extraction.
- Currants need no added pectin, grapes sometimes doRed currants are among the highest-pectin fruits in the kitchen. Concord grapes are high in acid but variable in pectin, and grape jelly is also prone to gritty tartrate crystals; letting the strained juice stand cold overnight and decanting off the sediment prevents that.
- Sealing"Sterilized glasses" in this period meant jelly tumblers sealed with a paraffin cap. Current practice is half-pint canning jars with two-piece lids, processed 5 minutes in a boiling-water bath; paraffin is no longer recommended because it cracks and admits mold.
- YieldThe book gives none. Reckon roughly one cup of finished jelly per cup of juice from the first extraction, and about 4 lb of currants or grapes to a quart of first-run juice.
The alcohol pectin test belongs to a specific moment in American home cooking: the years around 1910 to 1930, when the land-grant colleges and the new home economics departments were pushing jelly-making from a matter of grandmotherly judgment toward something measurable. The chemistry of pectin had been described in the nineteenth century, and by the time this book was printed the extension bulletins were teaching housewives to estimate it in their own juice with a jelly thermometer and a bottle of alcohol u2014 grain or denatured, as the bulletins often specified. Commercial bottled pectin, sold in the United States from the 1910s, eventually made the test obsolete for most cooks by standardizing the sugar ratio on the package. The three-extraction method is older and thriftier still, a habit from an era when fruit was picked rather than bought and nothing in the kettle was thrown away while it still held sweetness; currants in particular were a dooryard crop across the northern states until white pine blister rust led to bans on planting them in many places in the 1920s.