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Preserved Blackberries
4 pounds blackberries 4 pounds sugar Look over berries and wash. Cover with sugar and let stand two hours. Simmer until the boiling point is reached, boil one minute; cool, bring to the boiling point again, boil one minute; fill jars first with fruit, then with juice, and seal.
Preserved strawberries, raspberries, thimbleberries, and gooseberries are prepared in the same way. 4 pounds cherries
A pound-for-pound preserve of the old school, meant to keep the berries whole rather than cook them down to jam. The technique is sound; only the sealing method has been overtaken.
- The hinge: short boils, not long onesThe two one-minute boils with a cooling period between them are the whole point. Sugar draws into the fruit gradually while the berries stay intact, which a single long boil would destroy.
- "Simmer until the boiling point is reached"Bring the pan up slowly over medium-low heat so the sugar dissolves fully in the juice the berries have given up. Rushing it scorches the syrup at the bottom before the fruit has released liquid.
- Equal weights4 lb of sugar is roughly 9 cups, and 4 lb of blackberries about 12 cups. This is a 1:1 preserve by weight; the sugar does the preserving work, though with only two one-minute boils expect a loose syrup rather than a firm jam set.
- Sealing is the outdated partFilling and sealing jars straight from the kettle, with no processing afterward, is open-kettle canning. It is no longer accepted practice for shelf storage because the seal and the jar contents are not reliably sterile; follow a current tested boiling-water-bath procedure, or refrigerate the finished preserve and use it within a few weeks.
- Fruit first, then juicePack the berries into jars, then pour the hot syrup over to fill, as the recipe directs. Keeping the fruit whole in syrup is what distinguishes this from a jam.
- ThimbleberriesThe name is applied to more than one plant: Rubus odoratus in the East, R. parviflorus in the West, and in some older American usage the black raspberry, R. occidentalis. In any case a wild-gathered fruit, rarely sold. Black raspberries or loganberries are reasonable substitutes.
- Gooseberries need a handUnlike the soft berries, gooseberries have tough skins; top and tail them before starting. The book gives them no separate treatment, directing that they be prepared the same way.
- YieldAround 4 to 5 pints. The book gives none.
- The stray line"4 pounds cherries" at the end is the opening of the next recipe in the book, not part of this one.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer, in 1907 -- a house cookbook of the kind confectioners and millers produced to keep their name in the kitchen, and thorough enough that its preserving chapter reads like any general manual of the period. Pound-for-pound preserving was standard practice before commercial pectin came into general household use (Certo reached American shops around 1912), since sugar in that proportion both sets the syrup and does the preserving work. The instruction to boil briefly, cool, and boil again is a long-established solution to a real problem: how to saturate whole berries with syrup without reducing them to pulp. The list of interchangeable fruits is a reminder that a household in 1907 was preserving what it could pick as much as what it could buy.