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Rhubarb Jelly
Wash the stalks thoroughly, cut into pieces one inch long, boil to a soft pulp and strain through a jelly bag. To each pint of juice add one pound of loaf sugar and boil again, skimming often. When the juice "jellies" on the skimmer remove it from the fire and pour into jars.
A plain two-ingredient jelly that depends entirely on judging the setting point. Rhubarb is acidic but low in pectin, so the set is the thing to watch.
- The leaves are not foodUse the stalks only. Rhubarb leaf blades contain oxalic acid and related compounds in quantities that make them unfit to eat; trim them off and discard them before washing.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined cane sugar sold in solid cones and broken up as needed. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct equivalent: one pound is about 2 1/4 cups.
- The set is the hingeRhubarb has little pectin, so this will give a soft, spoonable jelly at best and may stay syrupy. The old skimmer test means dipping the skimmer and watching the last drops run together into a sheet rather than dripping separately; that point corresponds roughly to a thermometer reading of about 220F at sea level. Adding the juice of a lemon, or cooking a chopped tart apple with the rhubarb, improves the odds considerably.
- StrainingLet the pulp drip through the jelly bag on its own, ideally for several hours. Squeezing the bag pushes fine solids through and clouds the finished jelly.
- SkimmingSkim the foam off as it rises rather than at the end. Scum stirred back in leaves the jelly dull and speckled.
- Boiling timeWork in batches of no more than about four cups of juice. A deep pot of jelly boiled long and slow loses colour and turns brown before it sets; a shallow, fast boil in a wide pan brings the juice to the setting point far sooner, though with low-pectin rhubarb the time varies.
- Filling and keeping"Pour into jars" assumed the old practice of sealing with wax or a cloth cover. For shelf storage, fill sterilised jars to within a quarter inch of the top, seal, and process in a boiling water bath for ten minutes. Otherwise treat it as a refrigerator jelly and use it within a month.
- YieldAbout two pounds of trimmed rhubarb gives roughly a pint of juice, which with a pound of sugar makes two half-pint jars.
Rhubarb reached European kitchens by an odd route: the root was valued as a purgative drug for centuries, imported overland from China and Central Asia, long before anyone thought to eat the stalks. Culinary use spread in England through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as sugar became cheap enough to make a sour vegetable palatable, and by the time this book appeared rhubarb was a fixture of American kitchen gardens under the name "pie plant." Its appeal to the preserving household was seasonal logic as much as anything: rhubarb is ready weeks before any orchard fruit, so it gave the household the first preserve of the year and used up a crop that arrives all at once and will not keep.