Cider Jelly

 This is the first of seven recipes from the Preserves chapter. Frankly, I'm surprised there are not more recipes. For instance, not a single marmalade in the bunch, and I grew up on my grandmother's pear marmalade. Maybe I'll put Grandma Bailey's pear marmalade recipe in the front of this cookbook. They have a page for you to put your own. The thing is, how do you choose just one?!

Well, at least I've learned my lesson when I see a recipe from circa 1800s, in this cookbook. I go and look for a modern recipe to make sure I have all of the instructions needed.  This recipe comes out of an 1877 cookbook, "Fish, Flesh and Fowl: A Book of Recipes for Cooking" published by the Ladies of State Street Parish in Portland, Maine. Another church recipe, which I'm sure was good in its day. However, I'm going to substitute a modern recipe, with a nod to the Ladies at the State Street Congregational Church in Portland (where I took some of my seminary classes, years ago). One of my fav cooking magazines, recommended to me years ago by a parishioner who has published recipes in the magazine, is Taste of Home. So I googled Cider Jelly, and Taste of Home's recipe looked like fun.

Why fun, you might ask? Because it calls for unfiltered apple cider, powdered fruit pectin, sugar, and...red hots candy! It took a little while to find the candy. The larger grocery stores didn't carry it. Finally found red hots at the dollar store! Love, love, love the cheerful red in the little jelly jars.

It's been years since I've put up food. The Resident Archaeologist and I did some canning together some years back at a parsonage up in northern Maine, and enjoyed the process, but it sure is a process! And when my kids were little, living in the log-sided house on a dead-end dirt road, I did canning. Mostly green tomato relish, as I recall, when a frost was coming and I had to do something with those green tomatoes! Want to know my favorite part of canning? When you gently pull the jars out of the hot water bath, and place them on a dish towel to cool...and you start to hear the "pop" of the lids. It is such a satisfying sound that indicates "my work is done here." Oh, and the fun of giving something "homemade" to friends and relatives at Christmas, or donating to the church fair.

I had twelve 4 ounce jars and thought that would be enough. Hah! Thankfully, I had two 8 ounce jars sitting in the drying rack, and a box of new lids in my home office that I ran and grabbed, blue lids, but they look kinda happy with the red jelly, don't you think?



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