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Cranberry Jelly
Proceed as for Cranberry Sauce till berries are tender, when add a pound of sugar for each pint of juice and simmer three minutes before removing from fire. Strain through coarse sieve and place in wet moulds. Serve cold.
This entry assumes you have already read the Cranberry Sauce recipe immediately preceding it, which is the usual shorthand of turn-of-the-century fruit books. What follows fills in the gaps.
- The missing first step"Proceed as for Cranberry Sauce" means simmering the berries in water until the skins burst and the flesh collapses, ten minutes or so. The preceding sauce recipe gives the proportion; a cup of water to each pound of fruit is the usual sort of figure. Only then do you judge the quantity of juice and add sugar.
- Sugar ratioA pound of sugar to a pint of juice is roughly 2¼ cups sugar to 2 cups juice by volume, near enough the classic 1:1 jelly proportion. It works with the fruit's own pectin and acid to set the jelly, and it preserves it; cutting it will give you a loose sauce instead.
- Three minutes is correctCranberries are among the most pectin-rich and acidic fruits in the kitchen, so no added pectin or long boil is needed. Once the sugar has dissolved, a short hard simmer is enough — pushing it further darkens the colour and turns the set rubbery.
- "Coarse sieve" means a purée, not a clear jellyStraining through a coarse sieve pushes skin and pulp through with the juice, giving the opaque, sliceable jelly familiar from tinned cranberry sauce. For a translucent jelly, drip the cooked fruit through a jelly bag without pressing it.
- Wet mouldsRinse the moulds in cold water and pour the jelly in while still wet — the film of water keeps the jelly from gripping the metal and it turns out cleanly. Do not dry or grease them.
- Setting and storageChill at least four hours, and preferably overnight, before turning out. Because this is not sealed or processed, treat it as a refrigerator preserve and use it within two or three weeks.
- YieldA pound of cranberries gives something like a pint of juice and pulp, which with its sugar should make around a pint and a half of jelly, to be served alongside roast poultry or game.
Cranberries were among the few fruits in a book like this native to North America — the large cranberry, Vaccinium macrocarpon, though a smaller cranberry grows wild in Europe as well — and they turn up in nineteenth-century American cookery far more often than in British books of the same date. Wild bogs were being brought under deliberate cultivation in Massachusetts from about 1816, with New Jersey following later, and by the time this collection was printed cranberries were a commercial autumn crop shipped in barrels and kept for months in cold water. Their high acid and pectin content made them among the easiest fruits to jelly — no long boiling, no added setting agent, no guesswork with the sheeting test — which is why the instruction here can be as brief as three minutes on the fire. The moulded, turned-out form anticipates the ridged cylinder of tinned cranberry sauce, and the pairing with roast turkey and game was already conventional well before the recipe was written down.