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Blackberry Jelly
Mash blackberries and squeeze in jelly bag. Measure juice, allowing one pound of sugar to each pint of juice. Follow directions for Apple Jelly.
Damson, strawberry, cherry, and raspberry jellies are made in the same way. 4 cups cranberries
A two-line recipe that assumes you have already read the apple jelly entry a few pages earlier. The gaps are all in the technique, not the ingredients.
- The stray line"4 cups cranberries" belongs to the recipe that followed on the page and has nothing to do with the blackberry jelly. Ignore it.
- The proportionOne pound of sugar to one pint of juice is about 2 1/4 cups sugar to 2 cups juice — near enough equal volumes, which is the standard jelly ratio and the reason the finished jelly keeps.
- The jelly bagA double layer of dampened muslin or a fine flour-sack towel in a colander does the same work. Let it drip on its own; squeezing, despite the word in the original, pushes pulp through and clouds the jelly.
- Pectin is the hingeFully ripe blackberries are low to moderate in pectin and this recipe adds none. Including about a quarter underripe, still-red berries with the ripe ones improves the odds of a set. Commercial pectin works but changes the sugar timing, so follow the pectin package rather than this text if you use it.
- Judging the setBoil the juice hard for several minutes before adding warmed sugar, then boil until the jellying point — 220F at sea level, or until the syrup runs off a cold spoon in a sheet rather than drops. Cooking past this gives a stiff, dulled jelly.
- Sealing1900 practice was hot paraffin over the surface. Current practice is a hot-pack into clean half-pint jars with two-piece lids, processed 5 to 10 minutes in a boiling-water bath, headspace 1/4 inch.
- The variationsDamsons and cherries need to be crushed and briefly simmered with a little water first to release juice; strawberries and raspberries, like blackberries, are low in pectin and benefit from the same underripe-fruit trick.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907), written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company, was one of many manufacturer-sponsored cookbooks of the period, and its preserving chapter reflects a moment just before commercial pectin changed jelly-making entirely. Cooks then relied on the fruit's own pectin, on adding a share of underripe fruit, and on long hard boiling to concentrate it — which is why the book can tell you to treat blackberry, damson, cherry, strawberry and raspberry the same way and leave it at that. Fruit jelly done this way was a household necessity rather than a luxury: blackberries were gathered wild in quantity in late summer across most of the eastern United States, cost nothing but labour, and turned into the one bright thing on a winter breakfast table. Certo and similar bottled pectins reached American kitchens in the 1910s and 1920s, after which jelly recipes shifted to short boils and fixed timings, and the sheeting-off-a-spoon judgement this recipe depends on became a skill fewer cooks kept.