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Cranberry Jelly
Pick over and wash four cups of cranberries. Put into a kettle with one cup of cold water. Bring to boiling-point and cook twenty minutes. Rub through a sieve; add two cups of sugar. Cook five minutes and mold.
A four-ingredient jelly that works because cranberries carry their own pectin and acid; the only real skills are knowing when it has set and understanding that this is not a canned preserve.
- The hinge: cook the berries in very little waterOne cup of water to four cups of berries looks miserly, but the fruit releases plenty of its own juice as the skins burst. Adding more water dilutes the pectin and gives you a sauce that never firms up.
- QuantitiesFour cups of cranberries is about 400 g, a little over one 12 oz bag. Two cups of sugar is 400 g.
- Twenty minutes is for whole berriesThat length is aimed at breaking the skins down completely so they will pass through a sieve. Once the berries have all popped and collapsed, usually 10 to 15 minutes at a steady simmer, they are ready; longer only scorches the bottom.
- "Rub through a sieve"A conical sieve or a food mill with a fine plate does this in a minute or two, working the pulp with a wooden spoon or pestle and scraping the underside. A blender is the wrong tool here, as it purees the skins back in and clouds the jelly.
- Add the sugar off the boilStir it into the hot puree until fully dissolved before returning the pan to the heat, or undissolved crystals will catch and caramelize. Five minutes' brisk cooking after that is usually enough to bring the mixture to setting point.
- Testing the setA spoonful chilled on a cold saucer should wrinkle when pushed with a finger. On a thermometer the mixture reaches setting point around 220F.
- MoldingRinse the mold with cold water and do not dry it; the film of water lets the jelly release cleanly. Chill at least four hours, and preferably overnight, before turning out.
- This is not a canned preserveThe recipe gives no jars, no seal and no processing. Treat it as a fresh jelly: cover and refrigerate, and use within two weeks.
Good Things to Eat was published in 1911 by Rufus Estes, a chef born into slavery in Tennessee who went on to cook for the Pullman Company's private railcars and later for the subsidiaries of United States Steel; his book is generally recognized as one of the first cookbooks published by an African American chef. Cranberries are unusually well suited to jelly: Vaccinium macrocarpon is native to the bogs of the northeastern United States, and its combination of pectin and high acidity means it will set firmly with nothing but sugar, at a time when commercial pectin had not yet reached household kitchens. The molded, sliceable form Estes describes, rather than a loose sauce, was one common way to serve cranberry with roast poultry and game on American tables in the nineteenth century, and it survives more or less unchanged in the canned jelly that still holds the shape of its tin.