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Raspberry Jam
Pick over raspberries. Mash a few in the bottom of a preserving kettle, using a wooden potato masher, and so continue until the fruit is used. Heat slowly to boilingpoint, and add gradually an equal quantity of heated sugar. Cook slowly forty-five minutes. Put in a stone jar or tumblers.
A pectin-free jam of the old school: crushed fruit, an equal measure of sugar, and a long slow cook to concentrate it. The method still works, but the timing and the storage instructions both belong to 1896.
- "An equal quantity"Fannie Farmer measured by the cup, so this reads as one cup of sugar per cup of mashed berries; many contemporaries meant equal weight. Which of the two gives the greater proportion of sugar depends on how heavily the crushed fruit packs, but the amount is genuinely ambiguous in the original. Weight for weight (about 1 lb sugar per 1 lb fruit) gives a firmer, longer-keeping jam.
- Preserving kettleA wide, heavy, unlined copper or enamelled pan. Use the widest heavy-bottomed nonreactive pot you have; a tall narrow pot slows evaporation and scorches the bottom. Fill it no more than a third full, since raspberry jam foams up hard.
- No added waterThe mashing is the whole point. Crushing the berries in layers releases enough juice to keep them from catching before the sugar dissolves, so resist adding liquid.
- Heated sugarWarming the sugar in a low oven (about 250F) in a shallow pan keeps the boil from stalling when it goes in. Useful on a coal range, still helpful on a modern hob with a large batch.
- Forty-five minutes is longThat timing assumes a gentle simmer over an uneven fire. Current practice is a hard rolling boil for 10 to 20 minutes, which preserves the fresh raspberry flavour and the colour; three-quarters of an hour of cooking will give you something dark and caramel-edged.
- Test for setRaspberries carry moderate pectin and good acid, so no commercial pectin is needed. Cook to 220F, or until a spoonful chilled on a cold saucer wrinkles when pushed. Skim the foam at the end for a clear jam.
- SeedsThe recipe leaves them in. Pressing half the cooked jam through a fine sieve before the final minutes of boiling gives a smoother result without losing the body.
- StorageIgnore "a stone jar or tumblers." Open crocks sealed with melted paraffin were standard then and are no longer considered sound, as the wax seal cracks and admits mould. Fill hot sterilised canning jars and process in a boiling-water bath, or simply refrigerate or freeze the jam.
- YieldAbout 2 cups of jam, or two half-pint jars, from every 1 quart of berries.
This is Fannie Merritt Farmer's book at its most economical: a few lines for a preserve that a nineteenth-century household made in quantity every July, when raspberries came in all at once and would not keep three days. Equal weights of fruit and sugar was the working rule of preserving before commercial pectin, since sugar at that concentration binds enough water to hold spoilage organisms in check -- the sweetness is preservation, not just flavour. The direction to use a wooden potato masher may reflect concern about metal utensils discolouring acid fruit, though a wooden masher was also simply the ordinary tool of the kitchen. "Tumblers" points to the era's usual practice of filling drinking glasses with hot jam and sealing them with a disc of melted paraffin.