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Raspberry Jelly
Follow recipe for Currant Jelly, using raspberries in place of currants. Raspberry Jelly is the most critical to make, and should not be attempted if fruit is thoroughly ripe, or if it has been long picked.
The instruction is deliberately thin: Farmer sends you back to her Currant Jelly method, which means crushing the fruit, heating it just to the point where juice runs, draining it through a flannel or cheesecloth bag, then boiling the juice with sugar until it sheets. What follows is what that shorthand assumes you already know.
- The hinge is underripe fruitRaspberries are low in pectin, and pectin and acid both decline as the berry softens. Farmer's warning against fruit that is "thoroughly ripe" or long picked is the whole recipe: use berries that are still firm and slightly tart, freshly picked, or the juice may never set.
- Proportions from the currant recipeThe Currant Jelly method measures the strained juice, boils it about 20 minutes, then adds an equal measure of heated sugar and boils a few minutes more. Sugar in excess of the available pectin gives syrup rather than jelly, so a slightly reduced measure of sugar is sometimes suggested for raspberries.
- No waterThe fruit is heated in its own juice only. Adding water dilutes the pectin and acid that raspberries are already short of.
- Do not squeeze the bagLet the juice drip. Pressing forces pulp through and gives cloudy jelly.
- Work in small batchesBoil no more than about 4 cups of juice at a time. A deep pot of juice takes so long to reach the setting point that the pectin degrades and the color darkens.
- The setting point, in numbers"Sheets from the spoon" corresponds to 220F at sea level, or 8F above the boiling point of water where you are. A thermometer removes most of the guesswork Farmer calls critical.
- SealingFarmer's era poured jelly into open tumblers and covered them with melted paraffin. Current practice is hot jars, two-piece lids, and a 5- to 10-minute boiling-water bath; paraffin seals fail unevenly and are no longer recommended.
Fannie Farmer wrote this in 1896, two decades before commercial pectin reached American kitchens, and her nervousness about raspberry jelly is entirely a pectin problem she had no remedy for. Currants and tart apples are naturally rich in pectin and acid and set reliably; raspberries, cherries and strawberries are not, which is why nineteenth-century cookbooks often paired them with currant juice or, as here, hedged with warnings. Pectin had been identified and named by French chemists early in the century, but it was not sold as a household product until bottled and powdered extracts appeared in the years around the First World War, after which the "critical" fruits became ordinary. The instruction to avoid fruit that has been "long picked" also reflects a market where berries came from a garden or a local grower that morning, not from cold storage.