Home › Preserving and Canning › Jellies
Jellies
Heat and mash fruit until juice runs readily. If fruit is not entirely broken up rub through coarse sieve. Pour into sterilized jelly bags of unbleached muslin or doubled cheesecloth and drain thoroughly but do not squeeze. Take 7/8 cup sugar for each cup of juice. Boil juice 8 to 20 minutes (berries and currants less than other fruits); add sugar which has been heated in oven; stir until sugar is dissolved and boil about 5 minutes. Pour into hot sterilized tumblers. Hard fruits like apples and quinces should be cut up, covered with cold water and cooked until tender before turning into jelly bags.
This is a master method rather than a single recipe: it assumes you know your fruit and can judge the set by eye. The two things it leaves unsaid are how to tell when the jelly is done and how to store it once it is.
- Judging the setWith no added pectin, the finish is temperature and evaporation, not the clock. Jelly sets at about 220F (8F above the boiling point of water where you are), or when a spoonful sheets off the edge in two drops that run together. The stated "about 5 minutes" after the sugar goes in is a starting point only.
- Pectin varies by fruitCurrants, tart apples, quinces, crab apples, cranberries and unripe grapes carry enough pectin and acid to set alone. Strawberries, cherries, peaches and pears do not, and this method will give you syrup. Use slightly underripe fruit, which is richer in pectin than fully ripe.
- Do not squeeze the bagThe one instruction worth obeying literally. Pressing the bag pushes fruit solids and starch through the cloth and gives cloudy jelly. Let it hang several hours or overnight.
- 7/8 cup sugar per cup of juiceRoughly 175 g sugar per 240 ml juice. The ratio is not decorative: sugar is what makes pectin gel and what preserves the finished jelly. Cutting it substantially will prevent a set with this method.
- Heating the sugarSpread it in a shallow pan in a low oven for a few minutes; the recipe gives no temperature. The point is to keep the boiling juice from dropping off the boil when the sugar goes in, which shortens the second boil and helps keep the colour bright.
- TumblersStraight-sided glasses of the kind sold as jelly tumblers. Use half-pint canning jars instead; tumblers are not tempered and are not made to seal.
- Storage is the gapThe book stops at "pour into hot sterilized tumblers"; in this period the surface was commonly sealed with melted paraffin. Paraffin sealing is no longer recommended, as the wax shrinks and admits mould. Refrigerate the jelly and use it within a few weeks, or follow current boiling-water-bath processing times for jelly in half-pint jars.
- YieldRoughly a cup of finished jelly for each cup of juice is a serviceable rule of thumb, though yields vary a good deal with the fruit used.
Jelly-making of this kind belongs to the period before commercial pectin changed the craft. Powdered and liquid pectin extracts came onto the American market in the early twentieth century, and until then the cook's skill lay in choosing fruit that would set on its own and boiling it to the right point by eye. Hence the attention to fruits like apples and quinces, and the instruction to boil berries and currants less than other fruits. The unbleached muslin jelly bag was ordinary household equipment, and the injunction not to squeeze it is there because pressing forces pulp through the cloth and clouds the jelly.