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Laboratory Exercises (Qt cranberries C water medium)
1 qt. cranberries 1½ C. water 2 medium sized apples 2 C. sugar 1. Pick over and wash cranberries also wash, pare, core and slice apples. 2. Add water and boil until berries and apples are soft, then strain.
CRANBERRIES 3. Add sugar to fruit juice and cook until a little dropped on a cold saucer will harden like jelly. dish. 4. Turn into a mould which has been wet in cold water. 5. When ready to serve, turn out of mould into serving Cranberry Marmalade. 1 qt. cranberries 2 medium sized apples 1½ C. water 2 C. sugar 1. Pick over and wash cranberries, also wash, pare, core and slice apples. 2. Add water to berries and apples then cook until every berry has burst. 3. Add sugar and boil until it will drop in a thick drop from the spoon, or until a little dropped onto a cold saucer will harden like jelly. 4. Pour into molds wet in cold water.
Note. For filling cranberry pies, make the same as cranberry marmalade, only do not cook it as long after the sugar is added. Cranberry Sauce. 1 qt. cranberries 1½ C. sugar 1⅓ C. boiling water 1. Pick over and wash berries. 2. Add sugar and boiling water and boil ten minutes. 3. Serve cold.
Cranberry Pudding. 2 C. cranberry marmalade 1 egg 2 T. butter 1/4 C. sugar ¾ C. (?) milk 2 C. flour 3 t. baking powder t. salt 1. Sift flour, baking powder and salt together three times, 2. Add half the milk to the beaten egg and stir into the dry materials. 3. Add enough more milk to make a drop batter. 4. Melt butter and stir into the mixture. 5. Grease a baking dish, preferably a cake pan with a funnel in the center. 6. Pour marmalade into the bottom of the pan and pour the batter on top of the marmalade. 7. Bake in a moderate oven until the crust pulls away from the sides of the tin and feels firm when pressed lightly with the finger. 8. When the pudding is done, turn it wrong side up on a plate and serve with either vanilla sauce or hard sauce. Cranberry Roly Poly. 2 C. flour 4 t. baking powder t. salt 2 T. sugar 3 T. lard or butter C. (?) milk 1 C. cranberry marmalade. 1. Mix and sift dry materials three times. 2. Cut in lard with two knives. 3. Add enough milk to make a soft dough. 4. Turn onto a floured board and roll one-half inch thick. 5. Spread with marmalade and roll up like jelly roll. Be careful not to have marmalade too near the edge of the dough. 6. Place in buttered dish and steam 1½ hours. 7. Serve in slices with foamy sauce.
CRANBERRIES Foamy Sauce.
C. sugar 2 T. butter 2 T. flour 1 t. vanilla 1 C. boiling water 1 egg white 1. Mix sugar and flour together. 2. Add boiling water and cook five minutes, stirring constantly. 3. Remove from stove, add vanilla and butter, then pour onto the stiffly beaten egg white. Serve at once.
Cranberry Ice. 3 C. cranberries 4 C. water 1½ C. sugar juice of 1 lemon 1. Pick over and wash berries. 2. Add one cup of water and boil 15 minutes, then rub through the strainer. 3. Make a syrup by boiling sugar with the remaining 3 cups of water. 4. When cool, mix cranberry juice, syrup and lemon juice together. 5. Put in freezer and freeze. (In packing freezer, allow 3 C. of cracked ice to 1 C. of coarse salt.) Cranberry Sherbet.
Make the same as cranberry ice. When half frozen, add the stiffly beaten white of one egg and finish freezing.
A full cranberry unit from a school cookery laboratory: jelly, marmalade, sauce, two puddings, a sauce and two frozen desserts, all built from one quart of berries at a time. The measures assume the standard school cup of 8 oz and a level spoon.
- The hinge: the cold-saucer testCranberries and tart apples are both high in pectin, so no added setting agent is needed. Cook the sweetened juice until a drop chilled on a cold plate wrinkles and holds its shape; on a thermometer that is about 220F. Stop short of that for pie filling, as the note says, or the filling sets hard in the crust.
- Quantities of fruitA quart of cranberries is about a pound, or roughly four cups: a standard 12-oz supermarket bag and then some. Two medium apples means about 12 oz whole; use a firm tart variety, since a soft dessert apple collapses to sauce before the berries have burst.
- Straining for jellyThe first recipe is a jelly and the second a marmalade, from identical ingredients; the only difference is that the jelly is strained before the sugar goes in. Let the pulp drip through a jelly bag or several layers of cheesecloth without pressing, or the jelly clouds.
- MouldsWetting the mould with cold water is what lets the set jelly slide out. A plain metal bowl or a straight-sided tin works; anything with fine detail will tear a soft cranberry jelly.
- Oven temperature"A moderate oven" for the cranberry pudding is usually taken as about 350-375F. In a greased tube pan the pudding is likely to take roughly 30 to 40 minutes; the test given, crust pulling from the sides and springing back, is reliable.
- Baking powder and saltFor the pudding, 2 cups flour with 3 teaspoons baking powder is in line with period practice; the salt quantity has dropped out of the text as printed. The roly poly's 4 teaspoons to 2 cups is heavy by modern taste and can be cut to 3. Sifting three times is the school method for distributing leavening and can be replaced by thorough whisking.
- Steaming the roly polySet the buttered dish on a rack in a covered pot over an inch or two of simmering water and top up as it boils away. An hour and a half is right for a suet-era steamed roll; check that a skewer comes out clean rather than trusting the clock alone.
- Freezing the ice and sherbetThe 3-to-1 ice-to-salt packing is for a hand-crank churn. In a modern machine, chill the mixture thoroughly first and churn 20 to 30 minutes. Without a machine, freeze in a shallow pan and break up the crystals with a fork every half hour.
- The uncooked egg whitesFoamy sauce sets a stiff white with hot syrup, and the sherbet folds a raw white into a cold mixture; neither reaches a temperature that pasteurises the egg. Use pasteurised whites if serving children, the elderly or anyone pregnant.
- YieldsEach quart of berries gives roughly 2 to 3 cups of jelly or marmalade. The pudding and roly poly each serve six to eight; the ice makes about a quart and a half.
This is a laboratory unit rather than a chapter of a cookbook: one cheap seasonal ingredient worked through every technique a domestic-science class was meant to master, from jelly-making and the cold-saucer test to a steamed pudding, a baked batter pudding, a cornstarch-free foamy sauce and hand-churned ices. Cranberries suited the purpose because they are acid and rich in pectin, so they set dependably without the commercial pectins that only came into general use later, and because in the northern United States they were abundant and keepable through the winter. The berry itself was a native North American fruit long gathered wild before commercial bogs were established on Cape Cod in the nineteenth century, and by the time of this manual it was firmly fixed as an autumn and winter staple. The repeated instruction to sift dry ingredients three times and to test doneness by touch is characteristic of the period's teaching, which drilled measurable, repeatable procedure into students who might have learned cooking only by watching at home.