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Spiced Jelly
3 cups water (1½ lbs.) 5 heaping cups sugar (2½ lbs.) 1 package Pexel Spiced jelly is delicious in tarts or pastries or with meat. Place 3 1 lemon Spice, flavor and color to suit taste cupfuls of water in preserving kettle. Add 1 package Pexel slowly, stirring constantly to prevent lumping. Add the juice and finely grated rind of 1 lemon. Add 1½ level teaspoons of cinnamon, and ground clove and ginger to suit taste. Heat to a vigorous rolling boil. Add 5 heaping cups sugar, stirring until completely dissolved and continue heating until first sign of boiling. Remove from fire, let foam rise, skim and pour. Paraffin while hot.
A pectin-and-sugar jelly with no fruit in it at all beyond one lemon — the sort of recipe that only became possible once commercial powdered pectin reached home kitchens. It works, but the branded ingredient and the sealing method both need translating.
- PexelPexel was a commercial powdered fruit pectin sold under that name in the interwar years; the recipe treats "1 package" as a standard unit. Substitute one standard box of modern powdered pectin (about 1.75 oz / 49 g); do not use liquid pectin, which is added at the opposite end of the process.
- The hinge: pectin goes in before the sugarPowdered pectin must be dispersed into the cold or warm water and brought to a hard boil before the sugar arrives. Reverse the order and it will seize into lumps that never dissolve, and the jelly will not set.
- "12 level teaspoons of cinnamon"That is a quarter cup of ground cinnamon to three cups of water, wildly out of proportion with the rest of the recipe and most likely a transcription or typesetting error for a much smaller amount. Start at two teaspoons and taste the hot syrup before the sugar goes in.
- Ground spice clouds the jellyGround cinnamon, clove and ginger will leave the finished jelly muddy and gritty at the bottom of the glass. For a clear jelly, steep whole spices in the water first, strain, then proceed.
- "Color to suit taste"Presumably added food colouring; with no fruit behind it the jelly has little colour of its own beyond what the spices contribute.
- The lemon is structuralIts juice supplies the acid pectin needs to gel. Do not leave it out or reduce it, and use fresh juice rather than bottled if you also want the grated rind.
- "Continue heating until first sign of boiling"Modern powdered-pectin practice is a full rolling boil for one minute after the sugar dissolves, timed by the clock. The older wording is vaguer and undercooks easily; watch for a boil that cannot be stirred down.
- Paraffin sealingPouring melted wax over the top is no longer recommended — the seal cracks as it cools and admits mould. Fill sterilised half-pint jars, seal with two-piece lids and process in a boiling-water bath, or simply refrigerate and use within a few weeks.
- YieldSix cups of liquid and sugar give roughly five to six half-pint jars.
Jellies like this one belong squarely to the commercial-pectin era. Before the 1910s a jelly meant fruit juice boiled with sugar until its own pectin set it, and a cook without apples, currants or quinces had no jelly at all. Packaged pectin — Certo in liquid form, and powdered brands such as Pexel — cut the boiling time drastically and, as here, made it possible to gel water, sugar and a handful of spices into something that could be spooned onto a roast or piped into a tart shell. Manufacturers issued recipe leaflets, and those leaflets are a likely ancestor of this page: the exact quantities, the branded name treated as a generic ingredient, and the brisk numbered sequence all read like promotional copy. Church and society cookbooks of the period are full of such crossings between household tradition and the food industry.