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Cranberry Preserve
1 quart cranberries ½ teaspoonful carbonate of 1 pint (2 cups) water soda Sugar Pick over the berries, put them into an earthenware pot with the water, and cook slowly for one hour, stirring occasionally. Draw the pan to the side of the stove, and add the soda. Stir well, and carefully remove all scum as it rises. Then rub through a sieve, and to every cupful of the purée add one cupful of sugar. Return to the pan and cook gently for half an hour.
Put into jars and seal.
A plain sieved cranberry butter, unusual only in its use of soda to blunt the fruit's acidity. Two things need watching: the soda goes in off the heat, and the jars need real processing if they are to be stored.
- Add the soda off the heatAdd the soda away from the hottest heat -- "Draw the pan to the side of the stove" means shifting the pan to a cooler part of the range before the soda goes in. Carbonate of soda meeting hot cranberry acid foams up hard and fast; added over full heat in a full pan it can climb the sides. Stir it in slowly and skim the froth as it rises.
- Carbonate of sodaIn period cookery writing this usually means ordinary baking soda (sodium bicarbonate), though strictly "carbonate of soda" is washing soda; read it as bicarbonate. A teaspoon and a half to a quart of berries is a heavy dose by modern taste, and it neutralises much of the acid that makes cranberry set and taste bright. Half that amount, or none at all, gives a fresher, firmer preserve; too much reads faintly soapy.
- A quart of cranberriesMeasured whole in a dry quart measure, roughly 1 lb, or one and a third of the 12 oz bags sold today. Two cups of water is enough to keep them from catching before they release their own juice.
- The earthenware potGlazed earthenware does not react with acid fruit, which is the point of it here; note that the recipe then calls it "the pan". Any non-reactive pan works: stainless steel or enamelled cast iron. Avoid bare aluminium or unlined copper.
- The first hour of cookingThe berries burst within ten minutes; the remaining time is there to soften the skins so they will go through a sieve. Keep it at a bare simmer and stir up from the bottom, since thick cranberry pulp scorches easily.
- SievingA food mill with the medium plate does in two minutes what a hair sieve and wooden spoon did in fifteen. A blender is not a substitute; it purees the skins in rather than removing them.
- Equal sugar, half an hourCup for cup with the purée, cooked gently for thirty minutes, gives a thick spoonable butter rather than a firm jelly. Stir often at this stage and use a wide pan, as the sugared purée spits.
- Sealing and storage"Put into jars and seal" describes open-kettle canning, which is no longer considered sound even for high-acid fruit. Either refrigerate and use within a month, or ladle into hot half-pint jars leaving a quarter inch of headspace and process in a boiling-water bath for ten to fifteen minutes, adjusting for altitude.
- YieldRoughly three half-pints from a quart of berries, depending on how far the purée reduces.
Cranberries (Vaccinium macrocarpon) are a North American native, gathered from wild bogs long before commercial cultivation took hold on Cape Cod and in New Jersey in the nineteenth century, and by 1900 they were cheap, keeping fruit that arrived in barrels and held for weeks in a cold larder. The soda here belongs to a practice found in some Victorian and Edwardian recipes of dosing very sour fruits — cranberries, gooseberries, rhubarb, green plums — with a pinch of bicarbonate to cut the acid and so cut the sugar needed, a thrift measure as much as a taste one, and one that quietly costs the preserve some of its set.