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Preserving in Syrup
Another method, and many jam makers prefer this, is to first make a blended syrup and then cook the fruit in it. For example: equal weight of sugar and corn syrup; add half a pint of water and dissolve it by gentle heat. Then boil for half an hour, add the fruit and boil quickly until the jam jellies, allowing 3/4 pound of blended syrup to each pound of fruit. fine, corn syrup, and water. Simmer until it has the consistency of marmalade (about 1½ hours of slow cooking). Add nuts about 5 minutes before removing from the fire. (Makes 1½ cups of conserve.)
The page as printed is two recipes run together — the blended-syrup jam method breaks off mid-sentence and a fragment of a nut conserve follows it. Treat the first part as the working method and the tail as a note on a different preserve.
- The garbled joinAfter "3/4 pound of blended syrup to each pound of fruit" the text jumps: "fine, corn syrup, and water" appears to be the tail of an ingredient list for the conserve that follows. The 1½-hour simmer and the nuts belong to that second recipe, not to the quick-boiled jam.
- Blended syrup, made firstEqual weights of sugar and corn syrup with half a pint (1 cup) of water, dissolved gently, then boiled for half an hour. That preliminary boil concentrates the syrup so the fruit does not have to sit in the pan long enough to lose its shape.
- The proportionThree-quarters of a pound of finished syrup per pound of fruit is low by modern jam standards, where sugar often equals fruit by weight. Expect a soft set and a preserve that will not keep as long once opened.
- What corn syrup meantLight corn syrup here is a glucose syrup, not high-fructose corn syrup, which did not exist commercially until much later. Any plain light corn syrup or glucose syrup gives the intended result; golden syrup will work but adds its own flavour.
- Judging "until the jam jellies"Boil hard and check at 220F (8F above the boiling point of water at sea level), or use the cold-saucer test: a spoonful on a chilled plate should wrinkle when pushed. Glucose in the syrup slows crystallisation, so the mixture stays fluid-looking longer than an all-sugar jam at the same stage.
- VesselUse the widest heavy pan you have. A wide surface evaporates faster, which shortens the "boil quickly" phase and keeps the fruit from stewing to pulp.
- Storage, which the book omitsNothing here tells you how to put the jam up. Fill hot, clean jars and either process them in a boiling-water bath according to a current tested guide, or simply refrigerate and eat within a few weeks. Paraffin-sealed jars and inverted-jar sealing, both common in this period, are no longer considered reliable.
- YieldThe 1½ cups given applies to the nut conserve fragment, not to the syrup jam, whose yield depends entirely on how much fruit you start with. Reckon at least a half-pint jar per pound of fruit.
Blending cane sugar with corn syrup was a selling point in American home cookery from the early twentieth century, when domestic corn-refining put cheap glucose syrup on every grocery shelf and manufacturers pushed it hard in booklets and household columns. There was some technical sense behind the marketing: glucose interferes with sucrose crystallisation, so a preserve made with part corn syrup is less likely to turn grainy in the jar, and the syrup keeps fruit pieces glossy and whole. The two-stage method here — build and concentrate the syrup first, then poach the fruit in it briefly — is the old confectioner's approach to candied and preserved fruit, adapted for the home jam pan. The page itself is badly set, having lost a line between two recipes.