Currant Jelly
The currants should be large, fine, and fully ripe. The best and sweetest currants grow in the shade; and the largest, also. If exposed to the full heat of our American sun, it turns them sour, dries up the juice, and withers their growth. Gather them when fully ripe, strip them from the stems into a cullender, and wash and drain them. Transfer them to a large pan, and mash them well with a wooden beetle. Then put the currants, with their juice, into a bain-marie or double kettle, and cook them with the water outside, stirring them hard to bring out the juice. Simmer them for a quarter of an hour, and then transfer them to a very clean sieve, and press them over a pan till no more juice appears. Measure the juice, and to each pint allow a pound of broken-up loaf sugar. Mix the sugar with the juice, put all into a porcelain kettle, and boil it till the scum ceases to rise. If the sugar is of excellent quality, (the best double-refined should be used for all nice sweetmeats) it will need but little skimming, and leave no sediment when poured off. Boil it twenty minutes with the sugar. To try if it is done, take up a spoonful and hold it out in the open air. If it congeals very soon, it is cooked enough. Put it warm into glass tumblers. Cut out some white tissue paper into double rounds, exactly fitting the glasses. Press these papers lightly on the surface of the jelly; and, next day, tie over the top thick papers dipped in brandy, and set them in the sun all that day if the weather is bright and warm.
All jellies of small fruit may be made in a similar manner; first boiling the fruit by itself, and mashing it to get out all the juice. Then boiling the berries again, with the sugar, for about twenty minutes. The above receipt is equally good for grapes, blackberries, and gooseberries. Black currant jelly (excellent for sore throats,) requires but three quarters of a pound of sugar, the juice being very thick of itself. Peaches, plums, damsons, and green gages, must be scalded, peeled, and stoned, before boiling for jelly, and they require, at least, a pound and a half of sugar to a pint of juice. It is better to preserve them as marmalade than as jelly. Strawberries and raspberries require no previous cooking; mash out the juice, strain it, allow a pound of sugar to every pint of juice, and then boil them together (skimming carefully) for about a quarter of an hour, or till they congeal on being tried in the air.