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Cranberry Jelly
3 cups sugar ½ cup cold water Wash cranberries, mash, add water, and boil twenty minutes. Press through sieve, add sugar, and cook three minutes. Pour into glass and cover.
A very short recipe that assumes you already know the proportions — the printed ingredient line has lost the cranberries themselves. Cranberries are naturally high in pectin and acid, so this sets without any added pectin.
- The missing quantityOnly sugar and water are listed; the amount of fruit has dropped out of the text. Three cups of sugar would suit roughly a quart of raw cranberries (about a pound), a proportion common in period jelly recipes, but the original as printed is genuinely incomplete.
- "Pour into glass"This means a tumbler or jelly glass, not a canning jar with a two-piece lid. "Cover" at this date meant a paper or paraffin seal, which is not a shelf-stable closure by current standards. Treat the result as a refrigerator jelly and use it within two or three weeks.
- Boil twenty minutesThat is for the whole berries in only half a cup of water, over low heat at first so nothing scorches. Cranberries burst and collapse well before twenty minutes; the extra time is extracting pectin from the skins.
- Press through sieveUse a fine sieve or a food mill, and work the pulp firmly — the skins hold most of the colour and pectin. Do not use a blender first, which suspends skin particles and clouds the jelly. This yields a strained jelly, not a whole-berry sauce.
- Cook three minutesShort by design. Once the sugar dissolves, the acid and pectin already in the purée do the setting; boiling longer darkens the colour and can push it past a clean gel into something rubbery.
- Testing the setThere is no thermometer instruction here. A jelly of this type sheets off a cold spoon at around 220°F (104°C) at sea level, though with cranberries the set usually firms fully as it cools.
- YieldCannot be stated from the text as printed, since the quantity of fruit is missing; three cups of sugar plus the strained purée would make a substantial amount of jelly.
Cranberry jelly earns its place in the preserving chapter of a chocolate manufacturer's cookbook because cranberries were, for New England households, a cheap autumn staple that kept well and needed no imported pectin. The berries are among the most acidic and pectin-rich fruits grown in North America, which is why recipes like this one call for nothing but fruit, sugar and water and still set firm — commercial pectin was not widely sold to home cooks until the 1910s, and then as a liquid extract. Wild cranberries were harvested from bogs on Cape Cod and in New Jersey long before cultivation began in the nineteenth century, and the strained, moulded jelly served in a slab beside roast turkey is often seen as the forerunner of the canned cylinder sold today, though the resemblance may be closer than any documented line of descent. The instruction to pour into a glass and cover reflects the open-kettle method, generally thought to have been common at the time, which has since been superseded for anything meant to be stored at room temperature.