Mrs. Roundell's Practical cookery book

Currant Rob. — ( Family Recipe .) — Put the Black Currants in a jar in the oven. When they fall squeeze the juice from them and rub the pulp through a hair sieve on dishes, and dry it on a hot plate or before the fire. When dry cut it into squares half an inch across. Of the juice make black-currant jelly as the red is done. Currant Jelly. — ( Family Recipe.') — Strip the Currants, and put them into the oven. When done enough pass them through a hair sieve or a coarse cloth. To every pint of juice allow a pound of sugar well beaten and sifted. Heat the sugar on a dish in the oven between two sheets of writing paper, and when the juice has boiled one or two minutes strew the sugar in by degrees whilst it is hot. It will jelly immediately and gain flavour by keeping. Put the jelly at once into pots. Currant Jelly.— (Family Recipe.) — To six pounds of currants add four pounds of sugar and half a pint of currant juice. Stir the fruit well together in a pan, set it on a brisk fire, and when it boils up all round pass it through a cloth into a basin with a lip, and pour it into pots. Let them remain uncovered for nine days, then cover with brandy paper and tie up. Red, white, and black-currant jelly are all good made in this way. Brandy Cherries. — ( Family Recipe.) — To every pound of Morelia cherries stalked but not stoned add three-quarters of a pound of best sugar. Take a few cherries and bruise them, take as much of the juice as will make the sugar into a very thick syrup. Fill the bottles with cherries pricked with a fine needle. Let the syrup be quite cold, then pour it on the cherries, and fill the bottles up with brandy. Prunes in Cherry Brandy. — Choose a pound jar of the best French plums (prunes), and get a pint bottle of good cherry brandy. Put the prunes in an enamelled saucepan with as much light claret as will cover them, a blade of cinnamon, the zest and juice of one lemon, and two ounces of sugar. Stew very slowly till soft and till the wine has been nearly absorbed by the prunes. Put the prunes back in the jar with such of the liquid as may remain, and pour as much cherry brandy into it as the prunes will admit. Cover, and after a few hours examine the jar ; if the liquid no longer covers the prunes add a little more. Screw on the top. Never let the jar be empty, but as the prunes are used refill it -with freshly stewed ones, adding cherry brandy from time to time. [ Wyvern .] Blackberry Jelly. — This is much improved if half bullaces and half blackberries can be used. Keep it for six weeks before you turn it out. Scotch “Jaam Jeelly." — This is made from the berries of Mountain Ash trees gathered when they are quite red but not quite ripe. Take off the stalks and stew the berries as usual in the jar set in boiling water. They take a long time to get tender, but in the end they make a very good and pretty jelly. It is as good for coughs as black-currant jelly. For Mountain Ash berries allow a pound of sugar to a pound of pulp. Toffee. — Toffee certainly is not a Preserve, but the recipe seems to find its natural place in this chapter. On a wet day in the holidays children enjoy nothing more than making Toffee, and making it and tasting it whilst it is making will employ several boys and girls for hours.