When I looked through my database for a raspberry jelly recipe, I noticed that most of them had the addition of currants. This makes sense because the currants contain pectin to help the recipe “jell,” and the currants also add a little bit of tangy depth. This was particularly welcome in my case because I was not working with raspberries at all, but the less flavorful (but invasive and abundant) wineberry.
Interestingly, raspberries are native to North America but also to Asia Minor. They had already spread throughout Europe long before colonization.
It’s no surprise then, that raspberry-currant jams and jellies appear in the oldest Maryland cookbook manuscripts. With only three ingredients, there is not much variation. The distinction of jellies like this depended a lot on how good the cook was at clarifying the jelly. The more transparent, the more luxurious.
Like most of the more common people of those times, I lean towards preserves that don’t waste the fruit’s pulp. But with wineberries growing free and abundant, why not live like the other half!
My chosen recipe comes care of Mrs. Franklin Wilson’s recipe manuscript at the Maryland Center for History and Culture. The Wilson family collection is a huge trove of legal documents, scrapbooks, photographs, and letters.
In the box along with Mrs. Wilson’s c1850 cookbook, there are two diaries, deeds for land involving Ellicott’s Mill and old Maryland names like Galloway and Cheston, and a letter from a soldier stationed at Camden Station during the Civil War. “I hate the B&O RR from what I have heard of it and am sorry we are defending it after all,” the man wrote bitterly.
Mrs. Wilson was born Virginia Appleton in Bangor Maine in 1824. She married Reverend Franklin Wilson in 1848. The Reverend was heavily involved in the founding and sustaining of Franklin Square Baptist Church in Baltimore.
As far as I can tell that church, which stood on Calhoun Street north of Lexington, is no longer standing.
Virginia Appleton Wilson died in 1902 at the age of 77.
Recipe:
Take 3 lbs of raspberries mash and boil them 10 minutes. Put 1 pint of currants juice after they have been coddled as for jelly – Take 3/4 lbs of sugar to each lb? of juice boil 20 minutes or half an hour or till a thick jelly is produced
Wilson papers, MS 0833. H. Furlong Baldwin Library.
Historic preserving and pickling recipes should never be considered shelf-stable.
