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Amount of Water Allowed To Each Pound of Fruit
Fruit Apple...
Proportion of Water 1 gill to 1 pound Apricot Blackberry Cherry. 1 gill to 1 pound PLUM CONSERVE None ....1 gill red currant juice to each pound 1 Pound Plums 1-3 Pound Raisins 1/2 Cup Cold Water 1/4 Cup Nut Meats 2 Oranges 1-3 Cup Corn Syrup Enough to cover carrot None, mash a bit 1/2 gill to 1 pound None None None Wash, stone and cut the plums into pieces. Add the seeded raisins and 1 gill to 1 pound chopped orange pulp and peel, cut very None Carrot..
Currant, red.
Currant, black.
Damson Grape (unripe) Greengage Gooseberry Plum Quince and Apple Raspberry ..Water enough to cover bottom of pan Strawberry Rhubarb.
None None 1/2 gill to 1 pound As a rule, the procedure is as follows, though in special recipes other methods may be advised:
Place the prepared fruit in a kettle and simmer for a few minutes. Add the sugar and cook gently until it has dissolved. This is important, for if allowed to boil before it is dissolved the jam will be thin. When the sugar has dissolved, add the corn syrup-equal weight, pound for pound to the sugarthen boil fast. This again is important, as otherwise the product, whether jam, jelly or marmalade, will not be of good color.
Stir well and skim with a silver spoon.
When sugar is of good quality and clean fruit is used, there should not be very much scum.
This is a proportions table for how much water to add to each pound of fruit before cooking, followed by the book's general jam and jelly method. The table has become interleaved with a separate plum conserve, so read the fruit names and their proportions as pairs and ignore the conserve lines running through them.
- What a gill isA gill is half a cup, 4 fluid ounces. So "1 gill to 1 pound" is half a cup of water per pound of prepared fruit, and "1/2 gill" is a quarter cup.
- Why some fruits get noneJuicy fruits release their own liquid as they heat, so several entries in the table call for no added water; adding water to these only lengthens the boil. Firm, dry-fleshed fruit -- apple, quince, carrot -- needs water to soften before the sugar goes in. Which fruit takes which allowance cannot be matched up reliably here, as the lines have been interleaved; note that raspberry is given 'water enough to cover bottom of pan'.
- The hinge instructionDissolve the sugar completely before the mixture reaches a boil. The text warns that if it is allowed to boil before it dissolves, the jam will be thin. Stir over low heat until no grain can be felt on the back of the spoon.
- The corn syrupAn equal weight of corn syrup to sugar is a great deal by modern standards and gives a soft, very sweet, slow-setting preserve. It was used to stretch sugar and to guard against crystallisation. A quarter of that quantity, or none at all, suits current taste; reduce it and the fast boil at the end matters even more for colour.
- Testing the setThe original gives no finishing point. Jam sets at 220F (8 degrees above the boiling point of water at your altitude), or when a spoonful chilled on a cold saucer wrinkles when pushed.
- Silver spoon, aluminium kettleSilver spoon -- silver was probably specified because base metals could discolour acidic fruit. Any stainless steel spoon does the same job now. The recipe names only a 'kettle'; a stainless or enamelled pan is a safe modern choice.
- Carrot as fruitCarrot marmalade, cooked with lemon or orange, was a familiar sugar-stretching preserve. Carrot is low in acid and sets poorly on its own, so citrus juice and peel help it set.
- Storing itThe book stops at the boil. Preserves put up today should go into hot sterilised jars and be processed in a boiling-water bath according to current tested times for the fruit and jar size, not simply sealed with paraffin as was once usual.
Tables of this kind were common in the preserving chapters of early twentieth-century household books, giving the water allowance, which varies with how much juice a given fruit will surrender, alongside a single general method. The heavy reliance on corn syrup suggests, though it cannot fix, a date for the page. American sugar was conserved during the First World War, and glucose syrup, cheap and domestically produced, was promoted by manufacturers and home economics writers as a substitute in jams and candies; the habit is generally said to have outlasted the shortage.