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Cranberry Conserve
1 quart cranberries 1 1/3 cups water 1/4 pound seeded raisins 1/2 pound walnut meats 1 orange 1 1/2 pounds sugar Pick over, and wash the cranberries, put them in a saucepan with one-half the water, and boil until the skins break. Put through a strainer, and add the remaining water, raisins, nut meats chopped, orange finely cut, and sugar. Boil for twenty-five minutes and pour in a wet mold.
A stovetop conserve — cranberry jam enriched with raisins, walnuts and whole orange — set in a mold rather than sealed in jars. The original assumes you know when a preserve has thickened, which is the only real skill involved.
- The measurements in weightA quart of whole cranberries is about 4 cups, roughly a pound, or one and a third of the 12-ounce bags sold today. Half a pound of walnut meats is about 2 cups chopped, a quarter pound of raisins about three-quarters of a cup, and a pound and a half of sugar about 3 1/3 cups.
- Straining, not pureeing"Put through a strainer" means pressing the cooked berries through a sieve or food mill to leave the skins behind. A blender will not do the same job; it chops the skins in rather than removing them, and the finished conserve will be tougher in texture.
- The orange goes in whole"one orange finely cut" most likely means the entire fruit, peel included, chopped very fine, which is what gives a conserve its slight bitterness and body. Trim away the thickest white pith and any seeds, and mince the rest small so it softens in twenty-five minutes.
- Judge the set, not the clockTwenty-five minutes is a guide for a wide pan over steady heat. Cranberries are high in pectin and acid, so the mixture will set readily; look for 220F on a thermometer, or a spoonful that wrinkles when pushed on a chilled plate.
- Add the nuts late if you want crunchBoiled for the full time, as written, the walnuts soften into the preserve. Stirring them in during the last five minutes keeps more texture.
- "A wet mold"Rinse the mold with cold water and do not dry it; the film of water keeps the conserve from gripping the sides so it turns out cleanly. Any plain bowl or loaf pan works, and the conserve will slice once fully cold.
- Yield and keepingAbout three pints. This is not a canning recipe — no jars, no processing — so treat it as a refrigerator preserve, covered, and use it within two or three weeks.
- ServingSweet enough to eat as a fruit dessert, with cream or a plain cake, but it also sits well beside a heavier savory dish in place of a cranberry sauce.
"Conserve" had a settled meaning in American cookbooks of this period: a fruit preserve carried past plain jam by the addition of raisins, nuts and usually citrus, cooked to a spoonable set rather than a stiff jelly. Cranberries, native to the bogs of the northeastern United States and commercially cultivated on Cape Cod and in New Jersey from the nineteenth century onward, were among the fruits a household could buy cheaply in late autumn and keep for some weeks, and they appear often in books of this era in both sweet and savory guises. Walnuts and raisins supply richness and substance, and a mold of conserve turned out whole made a presentable dessert course from very ordinary stores.