Home › Cookery › Blackberry Jelly
Blackberry Jelly
Crush one quart blackberries with one pound best loaf sugar. Cook it over a gentle fire till thick, then add one gill best brandy. Stir it while over the fire, then put it in pots.--Mrs. E.
A four-line preserve from a book that assumes its reader already knows how jelly behaves. The proportions are sound; the vocabulary and the storage are what need translating.
- It is a jam, not a jellyNothing here is strained, so the seeds and pulp stay in. Expect a thick, seedy conserve. If you want something clear, cook the crushed fruit, press it through a jelly bag, and set the sugar against the strained juice instead.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined white sugar sold in a hard cone and broken up with nippers. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct equivalent; use one pound, which is about 2 1/4 cups.
- A gillHalf a cup, or 4 fluid ounces. That is a generous amount of brandy for a quart of fruit, and it will read clearly in the finished preserve.
- Sugar ratioOne quart of blackberries weighs roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb, so this works out at roughly three-quarters of a pound of sugar per pound of fruit, less than the one-to-one common in period preserves. Expect a softer set and shorter keeping than a one-to-one jam.
- When it is thick"Gentle fire" means a bare simmer with frequent stirring, since a low-sugar mixture with pulp in it scorches readily. Judge doneness at 220F on a thermometer, or by the cold-saucer test: a spoonful chilled a minute should wrinkle when pushed.
- The brandy goes in last, off the boilThe brandy goes in last -- The recipe adds it at the end and then stirs it over the fire, which keeps much of the aroma; a good deal of the alcohol will drive off with the heat. Stir only long enough to combine, then jar.
- "Pots"Small glazed earthenware or glass jars, filled hot and traditionally sealed with a brandy-soaked paper round under a tied cover. That seal is not a modern one. Treat the result as a refrigerator preserve and use it within a month, or process filled jars by a current water-bath canning guide.
- YieldRoughly 3 cups, or about three half-pint jars, depending on how far it is cooked down.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, gathered contributions from some 250 Virginia housekeepers, which is why so many of its recipes end in an initial rather than a name. Blackberries were often among the cheapest fruits a Southern household could put up, gathered wild from fencerows and roadside thickets rather than bought, and the sugar was the costly part of the pot. The brandy at the finish does double work: it flavors, and alcohol in a jar covered only with paper discourages surface mold, a technique long used for fruit butters and cordials alike. Blackberry preserves and blackberry brandy both had a medicinal reputation in nineteenth-century American households as remedies for summer bowel complaints, a use traditional rather than documented, and one reason the fruit turns up so often in books of this kind.