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M. a. T (To each pound of fruit add)
To each pound of fruit add three-fourths of a pound of sugar; mash each separately; then put together and boil from one-half to three-fourths of an hour.
A skeleton jam formula rather than a recipe for one fruit: it assumes the cook already knows which fruits she is combining and how she means to store the result. The important thing is that the ratio, not the fruit, is the recipe.
- The ratio is the whole pointThree-quarters of a pound of sugar to a pound of fruit is about 1 2/3 cups sugar per pound. That is a jam-strength ratio, not a preserve-strength one, so expect a soft set.
- "Mash each separately"Most naturally read as two or more fruits crushed on their own and only then combined, so that a firm fruit is not left in lumps while a soft one collapses. The recipe names no fruits, so this is inference; on that reading, do not shortcut it by mashing everything in one bowl.
- Which fruitsThe instruction to mash and the half-hour boil point to berries, currants, gooseberries, or plums. Currants and gooseberries carry enough pectin and acid to set on their own; strawberries and sweet cherries will not, and will stay syrupy at this ratio.
- Boiling timeHalf to three-quarters of an hour was written for a wide, shallow preserving pan over a wood or coal range. In a modern heavy pot judge by temperature or behaviour, not the clock: 220F at sea level, or a spoonful that wrinkles on a chilled saucer.
- Pot and stirringUse the widest heavy-bottomed pan you have, unlined copper or stainless, and stir often once the mixture thickens. High sugar scorches quickly on a modern flat burner, and scorched jam cannot be rescued.
- YieldTwo pounds of fruit with sugar gives roughly three to four half-pint jars.
- StorageThe original says nothing about sealing, and this is not a canning recipe. Treat it as refrigerator jam, good a few weeks cold; if you want shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested water-bath process with its own timings.
Nineteenth-century community cookbooks are full of entries like this one, filed under a contributor's initials and offered as a proportion rather than a dish. A cook who put up fruit every summer did not need to be told which berries were ripe or how many jars she had; she needed the sugar ratio, and the reminder that fruits of different textures should be crushed apart before they are cooked together. The three-to-four sugar ratio belongs to a period when refined sugar had become cheap enough for household preserving on a large scale, and when many households still leaned on sugar concentration as much as on sterilisation to keep fruit. If the book predates the First World War, commercial pectin would not yet have been on sale to home cooks, so the set depended on the fruit chosen and on boiling long enough to drive off water - which is why the instruction gives a range and trusts the cook to look at the pan.