Vintage Jelly & Jam Making Tips: Timeless Wisdom

Most of these tips come from a vintage booklet published in the 1940’s giving advice to homemakers on a variety of topics, others I’ve snipped from vintage articles. The Timeless Wisdom collection is a regular feature on Tipnut where we take a look back at the techniques and advice given to homemakers decades ago–many are still quite useful for today!

Homemade Apricot Jam

• A vegetable brush is just the thing to remove scum from jelly. Try it.
• Jelly which turns to sugar makes a delicious syrup for waffles or pancakes by adding 1/2 glass of water to 1 glass of jelly and heating just enough to dissolve.
• Jam or jelly that is hard or sugary will be like new if you leave it in a warm oven until the sugar softens.
• To Harden Jelly: After jelly glasses have been filled and allowed to cool and still the jelly has not hardened, place the glasses in a pan of cold water and set in the oven, allow them to cook until stiff.
• Strong, dark colored jelly results from the long cooking.
• Jellies made from frozen berries are superior to those made from fresh fruit. The freezing and thawing break down the cells of the fruit and allow the natural colors to dissolve in the juice.
• You can make jelly much clearer and more attractive looking by straining the fruit and juice through a flour sifter. It saves a lot of time and effort too.
• For the clearest of jellies, do not squeeze the jelly bag when extracting the juice. The juice yield will be less, but very clear.
• Jelly is improved if in place of water, it is made with juice left over from either dried or fresh fruit.
• To economize on sugar when making jam, let the fruit boil for about 10 minutes before adding sugar. Only about 1/2 of the usual amount of sugar will be needed.
• Reliable Jelly Test: Dip a silver fork into the boiling jelly, and if it fills in between tall the tines of the fork the jelly is done. If not, cook a little longer until it fills in between the tines instead of dripping through.
• In determining when the jellying point has been reached, place some of the jelly on a cold plate and draw a path through it with the point of a spoon. If the path stays without the jelly running together, the jellying point has been reached.
• If you put a teaspoon of butter in cold juice before you boil jelly you will not have a scum on the jelly.
• To prevent jam from burning: When making jam or marmalade, rub the bottom of preserving pan with a little oil or butter. This prevents burning and keeps the jam clear.
• Too much sugar is the most frequent cause of jelly failure.
• Juice which does not have a tart taste is not acid enough and needs lemon juice added to it, about 1 tablespoon per cup of juice.
• Use equal parts of ripe and slightly under-ripe fruit for best flavor when making jelly.
• Use hard-ripe fruits when not adding pectin; use fully ripe fruits if using pectin. Apples, currants, crab apples, grapes and sour plums do not need added pectin.
• For freshness of flavor: To have jellied fruit products at their best, make up only the quantity that can be used within a few months; they lose flavor in storage.
• When making jelly and jam, hang a piece of string over the edges of the glass before pouring in paraffin. This makes it easier to remove paraffin when opened for table use.
• Jellies can easily be sealed in the glasses by putting small pieces of paraffin in the bottom of the glass and pouring the hot jelly over it. The paraffin melts, rises to the surface and seals the glass perfectly.

Don’t miss this list of free canning jar labels and this tutorial showing you how to make your own: How To Make Personalized Labels.

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