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Rhubarb Jam
Mrs. T. W. Anderson.
Cut into pieces about an inch long, put a pound of syrup to every pound of rhubarb, and leave till morning; pour the syrup from it and boil till it thickens; then add the rhubarb and boil gently fifteen minutes; put up as you do currant jelly in tumblers; it will keep good a year.
A two-stage jam: the sugar draws the juice out overnight, the juice is reduced on its own, and the fruit goes back in only at the end so it keeps some shape. The wording is terse but the method is sound.
- "A pound of syrup"The method suggests plain sugar is meant: dry sugar left on cut rhubarb overnight makes its own syrup by morning, which is then poured off. Read it as equal weights of sugar and prepared rhubarb, but note that the original is genuinely ambiguous on the point and a pre-made sugar syrup cannot be ruled out.
- Leaves are not foodUse the stalks only. Rhubarb leaves contain oxalic acid in quantities that make them toxic, and they should be cut off and discarded rather than trimmed into the pot.
- Boil the syrup, not the fruitThis is the hinge of the recipe. Reducing the drained syrup first, then returning the rhubarb for a short gentle boil, is what keeps the pieces recognisable instead of collapsing them to purée.
- "Boil till it thickens"Take the syrup to about 220F (105C) at sea level, or until it sheets from a cold spoon. Fifteen minutes with the fruit back in is usually enough to finish it, though rhubarb is low in pectin and the result may stay on the soft side.
- Field versus forced rhubarbForced, pale, hothouse stalks are more tender and cook faster than thick green summer stalks. With coarse late-season rhubarb you may want to add a few spoonfuls of water at the maceration stage to get the syrup going.
- "Put up as you do currant jelly in tumblers"That meant hot jam into drinking glasses, sealed with a paper cover or a disc of melted paraffin. Both are obsolete. Use sterilised jars with two-piece lids and a ten-minute boiling-water bath, or simply refrigerate and eat within a month.
- "Keep good a year"True only of a properly sealed, high-sugar jam kept cool and dark. Any batch stored under paper or wax should be checked for surface mould before use, and discarded if found rather than scraped.
- YieldThe original gives none. Two pounds of trimmed rhubarb with two pounds of sugar makes roughly four to five half-pint jars.
Rhubarb was a garden plant before it was a dessert: it entered European and North American kitchens through apothecaries, who valued the root, and only became a food crop in earnest in the nineteenth century, once cheap sugar made the intensely sour stalks worth cooking. It appears early in the season — before strawberries, long before currants — which made it the first preserve of the year in households that measured the pantry by the calendar; American cookbooks knew it as pie plant, after the use to which it was most often put. This recipe's habit of putting jam up in tumblers rather than jars is a mark of its date; sealed glass canning jars existed but were not yet universal, and a great many family preserves lived under a round of paper or a skin of wax in whatever glassware was to hand. The attribution to Mrs. T. W. Anderson is typical of the compiled community cookbook, where recipes travelled under the name of the woman who vouched for them.