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Grape Fruit Jam
Cut the fruit into halves and squeeze the juice into a basin, then place the rinds, having first removed the pips into a saucepan with plenty of water, and boil them until soft, then drain and steep them in cold water for several hours. Next drain all the water off the rinds, scrape the insides to remove all the white pith, and cut them into shreds. Put into a pan one pound of sugar for each pound of fruit, and boil it to the feather degree, then put in the shredded peel, and the juice strained through a fine hair-sieve. Boil the fruit for twenty or twenty-five minutes, stirring constantly, and then turn it into jars. When the jam is cold, dip some round pieces of paper cut to the size of the jar into brandy, put them over the fruit, then cover each jar with parchment, and tie down securely.
This is a marmalade in all but name, built on the old English method of boiling, soaking and shredding the peel before it ever meets the sugar. The instructions assume a cook who knows the sugar-boiling stages by eye.
- The hinge: soaking the peelThe long boil, the several hours in cold water, and the scraping of the pith are what keep the jam from being punishingly bitter. Skip or shorten any of the three and grapefruit's bitterness will dominate the finished preserve.
- "The feather degree"A stage in sugar boiling, in the region of 232-240F/110-115C, tested in the old kitchens by dipping a skimmer and shaking it so the syrup flies off in feathery threads (the related 'blow' degree was the one tested by blowing through the holes). Use the thermometer.
- Pips and pithPips are the seeds. The white pith carries most of the bitterness, but it also carries most of the pectin, so a jam scraped this clean sets softly. Simmering the pips and scraped pith in a muslin bag with the fruit is the standard remedy if you want a firmer set.
- Hair sieveA sieve of woven horsehair; the non-metallic mesh had the advantage of not reacting with acidic fruit. Any fine nylon or stainless strainer does the same job now.
- Pound for poundOne pound of sugar to one pound of fruit is by weight. The recipe does not say whether 'fruit' means the whole grapefruit or the prepared peel plus strained juice; weighing after preparation is the safer reading.
- The twenty-five minute boilTime is a poor guide to set. Start testing at fifteen minutes with a chilled saucer, or take the jam to 220F/105C.
- Brandy papers and parchmentThe spirit-soaked disc and tied parchment cover were the period defence against surface mould, not a seal. High sugar and high acid make this preserve stable in principle, but if you want it shelf-stable now, put it into sterilised jars and process them in a boiling water bath; otherwise keep it refrigerated and eat it within a month or two.
Grapefruit was still something of a novelty when Oscar Tschirky compiled his book in 1896. The fruit had been grown in the West Indies since the eighteenth century, and although Florida groves date from earlier in the nineteenth century, commercial shipments only built up through the 1880s, so a grapefruit on a New York breakfast table in the 1890s was still an uncommon sight. The method here is not American at all: it is the standard British marmalade technique, boil the peel soft, soak out the bitterness, shred it, and cook it in a sugar syrup taken to a known degree, applied to a fruit that Seville oranges had trained cooks to handle. The brandy-dipped paper and the tied parchment cover belong to the same English tradition, a domestic practice that predates reliable screw-top jars and was still being printed in cookbooks long after better closures existed.