I made jelly yesterday. My mother always made jelly and until recently forgot how much better the taste is. Jam is so much easier to make, not that preserving either is difficult with pre-made pectin. With Jam you are not waiting for the juice to strain off. A fruit’s taste is so intense with jelly and a piece of toast is much better with out the seeds.
I grew up spending summers in a lake cabin … the salad days. From that time I remember dish cloths tied into bags and suspended from the cupboard handles oozing red juice into ceramic bowls. Jelly making takes time but when you extract the juice from berries you are left with an intense color and the essential flavor. Combine this with a quantity of sugar and some factory pectin over heat and you have jelly. The odd assortment of containers my mother ‘canned’ to were sealed with paraffin, melted in a tin can and poured over the cooling liquid. Current literature suggests, strongly, that you hot water bath anything not destined for the frig or freezer. It was part of the ritual to pry a wax seal off the top of an old juice glass. Jams and jelly didn’t stay our pantry shelves more than a season but summer fruit preserves were around for a PBJ in January and eaten with out incident. Perhaps the level of litigation today makes in impossible to suggest anything less than 10 minutes in boiling water. These days our preserving tends to be multiple batches which are held over a couple of seasons. I do miss that look of paraffin sealed jelly glasses … js
Makes we want to go back….