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Raspberry Jam
Wash and pick the berries, boil with a little water, mashing and scraping from the bottom as they simmer. When reduced to a thick pulp, add one-half pound sugar to each pound berries. Stew till very thick, scraping constantly from the bottom. Cool in a large bowl, then put in a glass jar with screw top. Blackberry, Dewberry, and Whortleberry Jam may be made by the same recipe.
A cooked-down, no-pectin jam that relies on long reduction rather than a set time or a thermometer. The proportions are given by weight, which is the most useful thing about it.
- The hinge: constant scrapingOnce the sugar goes in, the pan bottom will scorch within seconds if left alone, and a single burnt patch flavours the whole batch. Use a wide heavy pan, a flat-edged wooden or silicone spatula, and keep it moving across the base, not just stirring in circles.
- Sugar ratioHalf a pound of sugar to a pound of fruit is a little over a cup of granulated sugar per pound of berries — noticeably less sweet than modern jam, which often runs 1:1 by weight. The trade-off is a longer boil and a shorter keeping life.
- Judging the setWith no added pectin and this much fruit, the set comes from raspberry's own pectin plus evaporation. Look for 218–220F on a thermometer, or drop a spoonful on a chilled plate and push it with a finger: it should wrinkle rather than run.
- "A little water"A few tablespoons is enough for raspberries, which release juice immediately. Blackberries and whortleberries (huckleberries or blueberries) are drier and firmer-skinned and want a quarter cup or so per pound to start them off.
- Whortleberry and dewberryWhortleberry is an old name covering huckleberries and wild blueberries; dewberry is a low, trailing blackberry relative. Cultivated blueberries and blackberries work in their place, though both are generally treated as less acidic than raspberries in preserving and are often given a squeeze of lemon juice.
- SeedsThe recipe leaves the seeds in, which is authentic to jam as opposed to jelly. If you want them out, press half the cooked pulp through a sieve before adding sugar and return it to the pan.
- Filling and storageCooling in a bowl before jarring, as written, means the jam goes into the jar warm at best — that gives no vacuum seal. Either ladle it boiling into hot sterilised jars and process in a boiling-water bath for 10 minutes, or treat it as a refrigerator jam and use it within a month.
- YieldTwo pounds of berries with a pound of sugar gives roughly three half-pint jars.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (first printed 1878, also issued 1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, dates from well before commercial pectin was sold to home cooks, when a jam set on the fruit's own pectin and on how long the cook was willing to stand over the pan. That may explain both the low sugar and the insistent "scraping constantly from the bottom": the recipe reads as a set of instructions for managing a long reduction on a range with uneven heat. The list of interchangeable fruits — blackberry, dewberry, whortleberry — suggests fruit that was gathered as much as bought. The "glass jar with screw top" is a detail worth noticing: mass-produced home canning jars with threaded lids (Mason's patent dates from 1858) had become widely available in the decades after the Civil War.