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Raspberry Marmalade
To each pound of raspberries allow one-half pound of sugar. Hull and pick the raspberries, pass them through a sieve and place the pulp over the fire; stir it continually until it is reduced to one-half. Have ready some clarified sugar boiled to the ball degree, and when the raspberry pulp is reduced to half its original quantity pour it over; stir them well together, give the marmalade a few boils, take it from the fire, allow it to cool a little and put it into pots. When quite cold lay over the marmalade in each pot a piece of white paper dipped in brandy and cover air-tight.
A French-style fruit pulp preserve rather than a shred marmalade, and the whole thing hinges on getting the sugar to the right stage before it meets the fruit.
- "Ball degree"Roughly what we now call soft-ball stage, in the region of 235–245F on a candy thermometer. Clarified sugar simply means a syrup of sugar and water boiled and skimmed clear; you can boil plain sugar syrup to the same temperature and skip the old clarifying step with egg white.
- The ratioHalf a pound of sugar to a pound of berries is low by modern jam standards, where roughly equal weights of fruit and sugar are usual. Note that the pulp is reduced by half before the sugar meets it, so the concentration in the finished pot is higher than the raw ratio suggests, though still short of the level that makes a jam shelf-stable.
- Passing through a sieveThe point is to remove the seeds, so use a fine mesh or a food mill rather than a blender, which pulverises them. Expect to lose some weight as seeds and skin, depending on how hard you press the pulp through.
- Reducing by halfWork in a wide pan so evaporation is quick, and stir constantly as directed — raspberry pulp with no sugar in it yet scorches fast. Judge the halfway point by marking a wooden spoon or skewer against the depth of pulp before you start.
- "A few boils"Once the hot syrup goes in, one to two minutes of hard boiling is enough. Longer cooking dulls the fresh raspberry flavour that the separate-syrup method exists to protect.
- The brandy paperA disc of paper soaked in spirit laid on the surface was the standard nineteenth-century defence against surface mould, and it works reasonably well, but it is not a seal.
- StorageDo not treat "cover air-tight" as canning. Because of the low sugar, refrigerate the pots and use within a few weeks, freeze them, or process filled jars in a boiling-water bath following current tested times for berry jam.
- YieldFour pounds of raspberries with two pounds of sugar gives something over three pounds of finished marmalade, so five or six half-pint jars depending on how far the pulp is reduced.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 volume is a professional hotel book written for a kitchen working in the French manner, and the word marmalade here carries its older, broader sense: a stiff preserve of fruit pulp, not the citrus-peel conserve the word now suggests in English. The term is generally traced to the Portuguese marmelada, a solid quince paste, and it spread through European kitchens as a name for any fruit boiled down thick. The technique of reducing the fruit alone and only then adding sugar boiled to a set stage is a confectioner's method rather than a farmhouse one — it keeps the fruit's colour and perfume bright, which matters when the preserve is going out on a hotel breakfast tray. The brandy-dipped paper laid on top was standard household practice on both sides of the Atlantic in the era before reliable vacuum sealing, the alcohol discouraging the surface moulds that otherwise settled on an open pot of jam.