Loquat Jelly
Preferably gather the loquats when full sized but still hard and only partially turned in colour. Wash and remove blossom ends. Place on fire in cold water, barely covering with water, cooking slowly as with other fruits for jellies, till the pulp is very soft and the juice entirely free. Drain; cook down till juice is thick and cherry-coloured, when add heated sugar, pint for pint, gradually. When sugar is thoroughly dissolved cook fifteen minutes, or till it jells. The loquat makes a very beautiful, light-coloured, tart jelly, firm but exceedingly tender and delicate, resembling tart apple more than any other jelly.
A straightforward long-boil jelly with no added pectin, so everything depends on the fruit being caught underripe and the juice being reduced far enough before sugar goes in.
- Pick them hardThe instruction to gather loquats full-sized but still firm and barely coloured is the hinge of the recipe. Pectin and acid are generally at their highest just before ripening; juice from fully ripe, soft loquats is much less likely to set without added pectin or lemon.
- "Pint for pint"Equal volumes of reduced juice and sugar: 1 pint (2 cups) of juice to 1 pint of granulated sugar, which weighs roughly 14 oz / 400 g. Pint-for-pint is the usual proportion in jelly recipes of this kind.
- Heated sugarWarming the sugar first keeps the boil from stalling when it is added, so the batch comes back to temperature quickly and the colour stays light. Stir until fully dissolved before boiling hard again.
- Draining the pulpPour the cooked fruit into a jelly bag or several layers of damp cheesecloth and let it drip; do not squeeze or press. Pressed juice carries fine pulp through and turns a clear jelly cloudy.
- Judging the set"Fifteen minutes, or till it jells" is approximate. A thermometer is more reliable: 220F at sea level, or 8F above the boiling point of water where you are. The cold-plate test works too — a spoonful chilled on a saucer should wrinkle when pushed.
- The seedsLoquat seeds contain cyanogenic compounds and should not be crushed, chopped or included in the cooking. Cook the whole fruit as directed and discard the pulp and seeds with the spent mash; the strained juice is unaffected.
- Reducing the juiceCooking the juice down before sugar is what produces the "cherry-coloured" concentrate. The volume will drop appreciably, so measure the juice after reducing, not before, when working out the sugar.
- Yield and keepingThe batch will run to a few half-pint jars. The recipe predates modern canning practice: for shelf storage, fill hot sterilised jars and process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes, or simply refrigerate and use within a month.
The loquat (Eriobotrya japonica) is a native of southeastern China, long cultivated in Japan, and was carried into European gardens as an ornamental by the 1780s, later reaching Mediterranean and American gardens — which is largely how it reached the cookbooks. In the Gulf South and California it fruits in late winter and early spring, ahead of almost everything else, and produces far more than a household can eat out of hand; the fruit bruises easily and travels badly, so in the United States it never became a commercial crop and survives mostly as a dooryard tree, though Spain, Japan and China grow it commercially. That is the situation this recipe answers. Jelly-making was the standard use for a glut of an acid, thin-fleshed, heavily seeded fruit, and the comparison to tart apple jelly is apt in more than flavour: like crab apples and quinces, underripe loquats are rich enough in pectin and acid to set on their own, without any added pectin.