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Save on Christmas Gifts
When I make jellied cranberry for my own Christmas dinner, I always put up a few extra jars, using the following recipe: Make a sirup of two cups of sugar to one cup of water. Heat this until it boils slowly. Then pick over and wash one quart of cranberries. Drop these into the boiling sirup and cook until tender. When finished, the cranberries will have a transparent look. Pour into jelly-glasses or mayonnaise jars. When cool, cover with paraffin and wrap the top in white or fancy paper. Tied with ribbon and decorated with pine or holly, this makes an attractive and timely gift. - Mrs. C. B. S., New York, N. Y.
This is whole-berry cranberry preserve cooked in a heavy syrup — the writer calls it "jellied" because the pectin in the fruit sets the syrup as it cools. The method is sound; only the sealing and storage advice needs replacing.
- Quantities in modern termsA quart of cranberries is roughly 4 cups of whole berries, close to a pound; modern supermarket bags run 12 oz, so allow a little more than one bag. With 2 cups sugar and 1 cup water, expect enough to fill about three half-pint jars.
- The hinge: stop when the berries turn clearThat transparent look is the whole instruction. It arrives a few minutes after the berries go into the syrup, once most skins have burst. Cook well past it and the berries collapse into sauce.
- Boiling slowlyThe recipe wants a slow boil; let it bubble until the sugar is entirely dissolved and the liquid is clear. Undissolved sugar crystals can seed graininess as the preserve cools.
- Skip the paraffinWax seals are no longer considered safe or reliable; the wax shrinks, cracks and lets mold in along the glass. Use two-piece canning lids and process filled half-pints in a boiling-water bath, or simply refrigerate the jars and tell the recipient to keep them cold and eat them within about three weeks.
- Mayonnaise jarsReusing commercial food jars was common household practice, and they are still fine for a refrigerator gift, but they are not made for canning — the glass is thinner and the threads do not take a modern sealing lid. For anything shelf-stable, use proper jars.
- SetCranberries are high in pectin and acid, so this firms up on its own in the jar as it cools. Do not judge the consistency in the pot; it will look thin and syrupy right up to the moment you pour it.
- PresentationThe paper-and-ribbon top still works over a canning lid or a screwband. Pine and holly are decorative only — keep them off the food surface.
The "Dollar and Time Savers" pages of the Butterick book were built from reader letters, each signed with initials and a city, and they show a household economy that ran on the assumption that a homemade gift was a real gift rather than a lesser one. Cranberries suited that purpose exactly: they are native to North American bogs, they were being grown commercially on Cape Cod and in New Jersey through the nineteenth century, and they keep for weeks raw, which made them one of the few fresh fruits reliably available in a northern December. Their acidity and natural pectin also made them among the most forgiving things a home cook could put up — no added pectin, no lemon, no thermometer, just sugar, water and the eye's judgment that the skins had gone clear. The cranberry sauce sold in cans, which is what most Americans now picture at the word "jellied," existed commercially from the 1910s but only became a nationwide fixture later; here the term still means fruit set in its own syrup.