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Raspberry Jelly
These berries have a very delicate flavor but they need the addition of currants to make jelly of the proper consistency; used alone they never produce anything more than a thick syrup. Use two boxes of raspberries to one of currants, and follow the directions for currant jelly. The three boxes of fruit will yield five glasses of jelly.
A two-line recipe that assumes you have already read the currant jelly entry a few pages earlier. The useful information here is the ratio, and the reason for it.
- What a "box" wasBerries were sold by the dry pint or quart box; these measures most likely assume the pint size, roughly 10-12 oz of raspberries and about the same of currants. On that reading, two boxes of raspberries to one of currants comes to something like 1 1/2 lb raspberries to 3/4 lb currants.
- Why the currants are not optionalRaspberries are low in pectin and only moderately acidic, which is why on their own they set into syrup rather than jelly. Red currants are among the highest-pectin fruits in the kitchen, and they carry the acidity that makes pectin gel. Use red currants, not black, which will take over the flavor.
- SugarThe quantity is in the currant jelly recipe, not this one. Period practice was roughly a cup of sugar to a cup of strained juice, boiled together until it sheeted from the spoon.
- The setting pointThe hinge of the whole thing. Cook the juice and sugar to 220F at sea level, or about 8F above the boiling point of water where you are, and confirm with a chilled saucer or the sheet test off a metal spoon. Underboiled means syrup, overboiled means a stiff, caramelized jelly.
- StrainingCrush the fruit, simmer it briefly to release the juice, then let it drip through a jelly bag or several layers of cheesecloth without squeezing. Pressing the bag forces pulp through and clouds the finished jelly.
- Batch sizeDo not scale this up much. Jelly sets best in shallow, fast-boiling batches of no more than 6 to 8 cups of juice; a deep pot takes so long to reach 220F that the pectin degrades.
- Sealing"Five glasses" means five 8 oz jelly glasses, about 2 1/2 pints. Those glasses were sealed with a poured paraffin cap, which is no longer recommended because the wax shrinks and cracks. Use half-pint jars with two-piece lids and a 5- to 10-minute boiling water bath, or refrigerate and use within a month.
- If currants are hard to findFresh red currants have a short season; frozen ones work well for jelly, since the fruit is cooked and strained anyway.
Raspberry-and-currant jelly is a solution to a chemical problem that nineteenth-century preservers understood by experience long before pectin was isolated and sold in packets. Currants ripen alongside raspberries in northern gardens, and cooks learned that the combination set reliably while raspberries alone did not; the same logic produced apple-and-blackberry jelly and quince added to almost anything. Commercial pectin extract, generally traced to a 1913 patent, only became widely available to American home cooks in the years that followed, so a book of this period had to teach the ratio instead. Currants themselves became scarce in the United States soon after, as federal and state restrictions targeted Ribes plants for their role in the white pine blister rust cycle, in an eradication effort that ran from the 1910s into the 1960s, which is why a fruit treated here as an ordinary market staple can be difficult to buy in parts of the country today.