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The Sour Sop
a lemon added for each half-pint; add warm, granulated sugar, cup for cup with the juice, and let melt and boil. This should jell in about twenty-five minutes.
GUAVA JELLY No. 2 For this take the entire quantity of guavas well filled out but still quite under-ripe. Slice; place with cold water as above; simmer till cooked to pieces and strain. Foreach pint of thick juice which results place in another vessel a half-pound of sugar and a half pint of water. Make this into a syrup and when it has thickened somewhat add two pints of the syrup to each pint of the fruit juice. Cook slowly till it jells. (See Citron Melon in Jelly.)
A fragment of a two-part guava jelly entry, written for cooks who understood jelly-making by feel. The essentials still hold, but the sugar arithmetic in No. 2 does not quite add up as printed.
- Use underripe fruit, and mean itThe instruction to take guavas "well filled out but still quite under-ripe" is the hinge of the whole recipe. Guava pectin and acid are both highest just before ripening; fully ripe fruit tends to give a syrup that sets poorly or not at all.
- The syrup ratio is inconsistentA half-pound of sugar dissolved in a half-pint of water yields roughly one pint of syrup, not the two pints the recipe then calls for per pint of juice. Read it as sugar and juice in roughly equal volume, which is what No. 1 states outright, and scale the water accordingly.
- UnitsA pint here is 16 fl oz and a half-pint is one cup. "Cup for cup with the juice" in No. 1 is the standard 1:1 jelly proportion by volume, not by weight.
- Warming the sugarThe recipe calls for "warm" sugar, which dissolves faster and so drops the boiling juice off temperature less. The text does not say how the sugar was warmed.
- Judging the setTwenty-five minutes is a guide, not a rule. Jelly sets at roughly 220F at sea level, about 8F above the boiling point of water where you are, or when the last drops sheet off a cold spoon in a single sheet rather than two drips.
- Straining"Strain" means through a jelly bag or several layers of damp cheesecloth, left to drip undisturbed. Squeezing the bag forces pulp through and gives cloudy jelly.
- Yield and keepingTwo pints of prepared juice with sugar added will fill roughly five or six half-pint jars, depending on how far it is boiled down. Pour into hot sterilized jars and either water-bath process according to current guidance or keep refrigerated and use within a month.
Guava jelly was one of the great tropical exports of the nineteenth-century preserving trade, shipped north from Cuba, Florida and the West Indies long before fresh guavas could travel. The fruit is unusually well suited to it: high in pectin and acid when underripe, and strongly enough perfumed that even a heavily sugared jelly keeps its character. An American fruit-cookery book of this period gives two methods rather than one, the second making a separate syrup instead of simply boiling sugar into the juice. The cross-reference to citron melon points to the same household logic, since citron melon is generally said to have been grown chiefly as a preserving fruit, valued for firmness rather than for eating out of hand.