Cranberry Jelly
3 cups cranberries 1 cup boiling water 1 1/2 cups sugar Cook the cranberries in the water till tender. Rub them through a fine colander. This should make one pint of pulp. Put this pulp on the stove to heat, and put the sugar into the oven to heat. When the fruit boils, add the hot sugar to it. Allow it to boil up. Skim and pour into jelly glasses or molds wet in cold water. A clearer jelly may be made by putting the fruit, after it is cooked, into a jelly bag and allowing the juice to drain out. Measure this juice. Use three fourths as much sugar as you have juice, and proceed as before. The pulp which remains may be rubbed through a fine colander, sweetened, and used as sauce or marmalade.
A plain two-ingredient jelly that relies entirely on the cranberry's own pectin and acid, which is why it sets without any commercial pectin. The whole thing takes about twenty minutes.
- The hinge: keep it briefCranberries are so high in pectin and acid that the jelly sets almost as soon as the sugar dissolves and the mixture returns to a full boil. "Allow it to boil up" means exactly that — one hard boil of a minute or two. Long boiling darkens the colour and gives a stiff, gummy set.
- Quantities in modern termsThree cups of cranberries is a standard 12-oz bag. One cup of boiling water and 1 1/2 cups sugar complete it; the recipe expects the strained pulp to measure one pint before the sugar goes in.
- Heating the sugarWarming the sugar in the oven (the recipe specifies neither temperature nor time; a low oven and a shallow pan are enough) keeps it from checking the boil when added. It is a genuine help with a small batch, though stirring cold sugar into the boiling pulp off the heat until dissolved works as well.
- "Rub through a fine colander"This means a sieve or food mill fine enough to hold back skins and seeds — a modern medium-mesh strainer and a stiff spoon, or a food mill with the fine plate. Do not use a blender; it pulverises the skins and clouds the jelly.
- The clear versionFor the jelly-bag method, drain the cooked fruit without squeezing, or the jelly will be cloudy. Three-quarters as much sugar as juice by volume is a sound ratio for cranberry; a cup of juice takes 3/4 cup sugar.
- Molds and glassesWetting the molds in cold water lets the jelly slip out cleanly. Small ramekins or a loaf pan work; chill until firmly set before turning out.
- StorageThis is a fresh jelly, not a preserved one; the recipe gives no sealing instruction at all. Cover and refrigerate, and use within two weeks.
- The leftover pulpThe pulp from the jelly-bag method still holds most of the fruit's body. Sweetened to taste and cooked down a few minutes it makes a rough cranberry sauce; it will be less sharp than the jelly because much of the acid went out with the juice.
Cranberries were one of the few native North American fruits to hold a permanent place in nineteenth-century American cookery, largely because they keep for months in a cool cellar without any processing and because their acid and pectin make them nearly foolproof to set. This recipe itself gives both versions — the quick strained pulp jelly and the clarified jelly-bag version — and the second wastes nothing, the pulp going straight into a sauce or marmalade.