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Peach Marmalade
Use the same proportions as in the preceding. Cook the fruit and water until the fruit is soft. Put through a colander and add the sugar and lemon-juice. Cook below boiling-point until the marmalade will stiffen upon cooling in a dish. Put into glasses same as the preserves.
A cross-referenced recipe, which means the quantities live on the previous page rather than this one. The instruction that will decide whether it works is the temperature: as written, the marmalade cannot set.
- The missing proportions"The same proportions as in the preceding" refers to the recipe printed above this one in the book, so the ratio here is genuinely unknown out of context. Standard preserving practice of the period was roughly equal weights of fruit pulp and sugar, with water only enough to keep the fruit from catching, but treat that as a guess rather than Estes's figure.
- "Cook below boiling-point"This is the hinge. A fruit preserve normally sets when the syrup reaches about 220F/104C, roughly eight degrees above the boiling point of water. Held under a simmer the mixture will only thicken by slow evaporation, which takes a very long time, dulls the peach flavour, and may never concentrate far enough to give a firm set.
- Testing the setEstes's cold-dish test is still the reliable one: a spoonful chilled on a saucer should wrinkle and hold a line drawn through it. A thermometer reading of 220F/104C is faster confirmation.
- Peaches are low in pectinThe lemon juice is doing real work here, supplying the acid the set depends on. Slightly underripe fruit sets better than dead-ripe fruit; very ripe peaches may need added pectin or a longer boil.
- "Put through a colander"A colander in this sense means pressing the softened fruit through to leave skins and stones behind, the job a food mill or coarse sieve does now. Peel and stone the peaches first and you can skip the step entirely, mashing or briefly blending the cooked fruit instead.
- "Glasses" and sealingPreserving glasses of this period were commonly sealed with a poured layer of melted paraffin, which is no longer recommended because the wax shrinks and admits mould. Ladle into hot canning jars and process in a boiling-water bath according to current guidance, or refrigerate and treat it as a fresh preserve to be used within a few weeks.
- YieldThe book gives none, and none can be derived here, since both the proportions and the degree of reduction are unstated.
Good Things to Eat, as Suggested by Rufus (1911) was written by Rufus Estes, born enslaved in Tennessee in 1857, who cooked in Chicago restaurants, spent years in the Pullman company's private railroad cars, and later ran the dining rooms of a steel company; it is among the earliest cookbooks published by an African American author. The canning and preserving chapter reflects a kitchen in which putting up summer fruit was routine domestic work rather than a hobby, and the terse cross-reference here is characteristic of the period's cookbooks, which assumed a reader working straight down the page and needing no repetition. Marmalade at this date did not mean citrus specifically: the word covered any preserve of fruit cooked to a pulp and thickened, from the Portuguese marmelada, a paste of quinces, and English cooks had been making peach, apricot and plum marmalades under that name for well over two centuries before Estes wrote.