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Cranberry Jelly
Pick over and wash four cups cranberries. Put in a stewpan with two cups boiling water, and boil twenty minutes .
Rub through a sieve, add two cups sugar, and cook five cook five minutes. Turn into a mould or glasses.
A straightforward strained cranberry sauce that sets on the fruit's own pectin. Almost nothing here needs updating except the language and a few numbers.
- QuantitiesFour cups of whole cranberries is about one pound. Two cups of sugar to one pound of fruit is on the sweet side by current taste; less sugar will still set, though the jelly will be softer.
- StewpanAny heavy non-reactive saucepan of two to three quarts. Avoid bare aluminum or unlined copper, which react with the fruit's acid and can dull the colour.
- Twenty minutesThe berries burst within five to eight minutes; the rest of the time is reducing the water and breaking the skins down so they will pass through a sieve. Stir occasionally, as the pulp catches once it thickens.
- Rubbing through a sieveUse a fine-mesh sieve and a stiff rubber spatula or wooden pestle, and scrape the underside of the sieve to recover the puree clinging there. A food mill with the fine plate is faster. Skins and seeds are all that should be left behind.
- Adding the sugarAdd it off the boil and stir until dissolved before returning to the heat, so no crystals scorch on the pan bottom. Five minutes of cooking after is generally enough to set, depending on how far the pulp has reduced; longer gives a stiffer, more sliceable jelly.
- Moulds and glassesRinse the mould in cold water and leave it wet before filling, which lets the set jelly slide out. Cranberries are high in both pectin and acid, so this sets without added pectin as it cools.
- Yield and keepingRoughly two and a half to three cups, serving eight to ten alongside poultry. This is not a sealed preserve; keep it covered in the refrigerator and use within two weeks.
Cranberries were among the few native North American fruits to become a fixed part of the nineteenth-century American table, largely because they keep for months in a cold cellar without processing and because their acidity and pectin make them set with nothing but sugar. Commercial cultivation on the Cape Cod bogs expanded through the second half of the 1800s, which put cheap barrels of berries within reach of Boston households and helps explain why Fannie Farmer gives cranberries several entries. The strained jelly here is often said to anticipate the canned cylinder most Americans now know. Farmer's book also carries an unstrained cranberry sauce. The doubled "cook five cook five minutes" is a typesetting slip.