Blackberry Jam, 1846

More summer preserves, this time Blackberry Jam from Miss Beecher's Domestic Receipt Book (1846; 3rd ed, 1856.) 

Blackberry Jam. Allow three quarters of a pound of brown sugar to a pound of fruit. Boil the fruit half an hour, then add the sugar and boil all together ten minutes. 

 

I ended up with 68 oz of blackberries (4 1/4 lbs, or just short of one ice-cream tub full), and thus used 51 oz brown sugar. Anticipating about 4 pints of jam, as previous batches seem to produce just under 1 pint jam per pound berries, I was pleasantly surprised to get 5 pints (1 pint, 6 half-pints, 4 quarter-pints to be precise), which I must put down to the extra sugar, and no material being lost to skimming. Processed 10 minutes, based on my current elevation.

Obviously, this receipt was very similar to the jams in Eliza Acton's book, but with a higher proportion of sugar, and the specification to use brown sugar with the blackberries. I had planned to follow Acton's advice about skimming, but found it unnecessary, as no scum of any sort rose to the top of the mixture (perhaps why Beecher makes no mention of it). As usual, I consulted modern recipes for safe water-bath processing times, and to check that the sugar to fruit ratio is high enough. These historic receipts generally resemble the modern ones quite closely, except that they rely on boiling the fruit alone to thicken the preserves, instead of adding pectin.