Home › More Recipes › Spiced Jelly
Spiced Jelly
Put in saucepan 1 cup syrup strained from spiced figs or other spiced or sweet pickled fruit. Bring to boiling point, add 1/4 cup commercial pectin, boil 1/2 minute and turn into glasses or individual molds.
A thrifty one-cup jelly made from the leftover syrup of spiced or pickled fruit. It depends entirely on the sugar and acid already in that syrup, so the result varies with whatever jar you drained.
- "Commercial pectin" means liquidIn older recipes this phrase generally meant bottled liquid pectin of the Certo type, not the powdered pectin sold in boxes today, and the method here (pectin stirred in at the end, after the boil) is the liquid-pectin procedure. The two are not interchangeable: powder is added to the cold or warm juice before the sugar and given a hard boil, while liquid goes in at the end as written here.
- The syrup must be sweet and sour enoughLiquid pectin sets only with a high proportion of sugar to juice and real acidity. A spiced fig or pickled peach syrup is usually heavy with sugar and acid, which is presumably why it works here, but a thin or mostly drained syrup will stay loose. Taste it first; if it is not frankly sweet and sharp, it may not gel.
- Half a minute means half a minuteOnce the pectin is in, time the boil. Extended boiling can break down pectin and give a syrup that never firms.
- Skim before pouringJellies of this kind commonly throw foam. Skim it off as the pot leaves the heat, or it will set into the top of the jelly.
- YieldAbout 1 1/4 cups, counting the added pectin, or a few small individual molds. It is a small, garnish-sized quantity.
- Glasses and storagePeriod practice was to seal jelly glasses with melted paraffin for the pantry shelf. Do not do that. Pour into clean covered jars, cool, and keep in the refrigerator; use within a few weeks.
- If it does not setGive it 24 to 48 hours before deciding, as small batches sometimes firm slowly. What remains loose is a good spiced glaze for ham or a spoon sauce for cold meat.
This is a luncheon trick: the syrup drained from a jar of spiced figs or other spiced or sweet pickled fruit was too good to pour away, and bottled pectin had only recently made it possible to turn any sweet-acid liquid into jelly quickly. Commercial liquid pectin reached American home kitchens in the years around 1912 to 1920 and was heavily promoted with exactly this kind of recipe, which shows off speed and near-zero cost rather than skill. Spiced and pickled fruits themselves were a staple of the American preserving pantry through the nineteenth century, served in small glass dishes alongside cold meats, and this jelly is simply their afterlife.