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Rhubarb Jelly
Wash and wipe the stalks, and, without paring, cut them in pieces an inch long. Put in a porcelain kettle, allowing one pint of water to four pounds of rhubarb. Boil to a soft pulp, turn into a jelly bag and finish precisely the same as apple jelly.
A two-line recipe that leans entirely on a cross-reference: everything that matters happens in the "finish precisely the same as apple jelly" step, which supplies the sugar the ingredient list never mentions. A few notes on that, and on rhubarb's particular stubbornness.
- The missing sugarNineteenth-century apple-jelly practice was to strain the pulp, measure the juice, and boil it with sugar, commonly in the region of three-quarters of a pound to a pound of sugar per pint of juice. Without that step this is simply rhubarb water; the sugar is what makes it keep and what helps it set.
- Rhubarb sets poorlyRhubarb is acidic but low in pectin, so a juice-only jelly often stays syrupy no matter how long it boils. Some period recipes combine it with apple or currant juice for this reason; commercial pectin, following the packet's own ratios, is the modern answer.
- Porcelain kettleThis means an enamelled cast-iron or enamelled steel pan, not porcelain. The point is that rhubarb's oxalic and malic acids attack bare copper, iron and aluminium, giving a metallic taste and dull colour. Stainless steel is the current equivalent.
- Leaves are not foodOnly the stalks go in. Rhubarb leaf blades contain enough oxalic acid and related compounds to cause serious poisoning; trim them off and discard them, including the small leafy fringe at the top of a stalk.
- Do not squeeze the bagLet the pulp drip through the jelly bag under its own weight, several hours or overnight. Wringing or pressing forces fine solids through and produces a cloudy, sometimes gritty jelly.
- Judging the setThe old test was the sheeting drip from a spoon. A thermometer is faster: 220F (104C) at sea level, or a wrinkle test on a plate chilled in the freezer.
- Yield and keepingFour pounds of rhubarb boiled with a pint of water will give several cups of juice, enough for roughly four or five half-pint jars once sugared. The recipe gives no sealing instructions; either refrigerate the jars and use within a few weeks, or process them by a current tested water-bath schedule.
Rhubarb came to European kitchens by a long detour: the dried root was a valued purgative in the medieval and early modern drug trade, moving overland from China and Central Asia, and it was only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the leaf stalks were widely eaten as a fruit. Cheap sugar made that possible, since the stalks are too sour to be pleasant otherwise. British growers in the West Riding of Yorkshire built a forcing industry around it, and in America it acquired the plain name "pieplant," which is how many household books of this period index it. Its appeal in a book of this vintage was seasonal: rhubarb is ready in early spring, weeks ahead of any orchard or berry fruit, so a rhubarb jelly was often the first new preserve of the year, made at exactly the moment the previous autumn's jars were running out.