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Confiture, Menagere
Have five pounds each apricots, egg plums and cherries, five quarts peaches, two and a half quarts each pears and quinces. Peel peaches, pears and quinces, split in two, also split plums and apricots, and remove stones, seeds and stems from all. Place fifteen pounds granulated sugar in a large copper basin with a vanilla stick and a gill good rum, cook on brisk fire until sugar begins to bubble, add all the fruits at once, gently stir and slowly cook for thirty minutes. Remove, pour jam into a large jelly glass, slightly warmed so as to prevent cracking, and let thoroughly cool off. Cover jam with double wax paper dipped in cognac, tightly cover glass, then jam is ready for use.
A French-style mixed-fruit preserve on a commercial scale: roughly twenty-five pounds of fruit to fifteen pounds of sugar. Halve or quarter it unless you have a preserving pan the size of a stockpot and somewhere to put two dozen jars.
- The scaleAs written this yields something on the order of 20 to 24 pints. A quarter batch (about 1 lb 4 oz each apricots, plums and cherries, 1 1/4 quarts peaches, and so on with 3 3/4 lb sugar) fits an 8-quart pan and still fills five or six pints.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. The rum goes into the sugar at the start, so most of the alcohol cooks off and what is left is flavour.
- Egg plumsAn older name for the large oval plums, usually yellow, still sometimes sold as yellow egg. Any firm freestone plum works; avoid very soft red dessert plums, which collapse.
- Copper basinA bassine à confiture, the unlined flared copper preserving pan. Unlined copper reacts with acid fruit and is best avoided today; a wide stainless or enamelled pan with a heavy base does the same job. Width matters more than the metal, since evaporation is what sets the jam.
- Brisk fireHigh heat. The sugar is melted almost dry with the rum and vanilla before the fruit goes in, which means it will scorch quickly if left unstirred at that stage.
- Thirty minutes will not set itThat timing suits a shallow copper pan over a coal range. In a modern pot, cook until the mixture reaches 220F, or until a spoonful wrinkles on a chilled saucer. Quinces and pears also need to be genuinely tender before the jam is done; if they are hard when the sugar is ready, they will stay hard in the jar.
- Vanilla stickA whole vanilla bean, left in the pan and fished out at the end. Split it lengthwise for more flavour than the original would have got.
- Jars and sealing"A large jelly glass" means a large preserving glass; warming it is simply to prevent thermal shock, which modern jars handle better. Waxed paper dipped in cognac laid on the surface was the period's mould-guard and is not a seal. For shelf storage, use current boiling-water canning directions for jam; otherwise refrigerate and use within a month or two.
Confiture ménagère means simply "housekeeper's jam" — the household preserve, as opposed to the single-fruit confitures a confectioner would sell. Its logic is the logic of using up what the season has left: everything that will not keep another week goes into one pan together. The quinces are not incidental; they are among the fruits contributing pectin, along with the apricots and plums, which is what allows a mixture this wet and this varied to set. The rum, the vanilla bean and the sheet of waxed paper dipped in cognac laid over the cooled surface are all standard French domestic practice of the period, the spirit acting against surface mould in an age before reliable vacuum seals.