Home › Jellies And Jams › Apple or Blackberry Jelly
Apple or Blackberry Jelly
Prepare nice, tart, juicy apples as in general directions, using three quarters of a pint of sugar to a pint of juice. Prepare blackberry of a pint of sugar to a pint of juice. Prepare blackberry jelly according to general directions for berries.
A shorthand entry that leans entirely on the book's "general directions" for extracting juice: fruit barely covered with water, cooked soft, then drained through a flannel or muslin bag. The proportions given are by volume, not weight, and that is the only real instruction here.
- The ratio, in cupsA pint is 2 cups, so three-quarters of a pint of sugar to a pint of juice works out to about 1 1/2 cups sugar (roughly 10 oz) per 2 cups juice. The blackberry sentence is garbled in the original; the operative instruction is only that blackberry jelly follows the general directions for berries, with no ratio given.
- Tart apples are the point"Nice, tart, juicy" means firm, slightly underripe cooking apples, and the recipe assumes no commercial pectin. Crabapples and slightly underripe fruit set best; sweet dessert varieties will give a syrup rather than a jelly. Include cores and peel in the first cooking, as that is where most of the pectin sits.
- Blackberries need helpBlackberries are relatively low in pectin, and blackberry juice alone can be slow to set. Including some still-red berries, or blending in apple juice, are long-standing remedies, though this entry itself gives no instruction to combine the two fruits.
- Do not squeeze the bagLetting the juice drip unaided takes hours but keeps the jelly clear. Pressing or twisting the bag pushes pulp through and gives a cloudy result that no amount of skimming will fix.
- How to know it is doneBoil hard in an uncovered wide pan and test at 220F (8F above the boiling point of water at your altitude), or use the cold-plate test. Modern jellies are boiled fast and briefly; long slow simmering darkens the colour and breaks down the pectin.
- SealingThe paraffin or brandied-paper seals of this era are no longer considered sound for storage. Follow current water-bath canning guidance for jellies, or simply refrigerate and use within a few weeks.
- YieldFour cups of juice gives roughly four to five half-pint jars, depending on how far the syrup is boiled down.
Jelly recipes of this compression were normal in nineteenth-century American cookbooks because the method was assumed knowledge: every jelly in the chapter followed one set of "general directions," and individual entries recorded only the sugar ratio and any quirk of the fruit. Apple jelly was a staple of such chapters for practical reasons rather than sentimental ones, since apples were cheap, kept well into winter, and carried enough natural pectin and acid to set on their own, before Certo and other commercial pectins became household items in the 1910s and 1920s. The pairing of apple with blackberry in a single entry reflects the common kitchen habit of using apple juice as a setting agent for softer summer fruit. The Dixie Cook Book, compiled in the 1880s from Southern contributors, belongs to the tradition of community-sourced regional books with substantial preserving chapters, a fair measure of how much of the year's fruit had to be captured in glass.