Recipes for preserves from vintage cookbooks.

Recipes for preserves from vintage cookbooks.

August is the best time to make fruit and vegetable preserves, all kinds of preserves, marmalades, juices, jellies, compotes and tinctures.

After a few years of fascination with juices in cartons, there is a fashion for everything that is domestic and preferably eco. We want to fill our pantries with homemade preserves and we return to grandma's recipes with sentiment.

It would seem that in the times of our grandmothers, homemade preserves were in every home, but this is the fragment we can read in the old cookbook entitled "Modern home kitchen" by Antonina Piętkowa, published in 1939:

"The time has passed when the housewives filled the shelves with jars of preserves, today they are almost luxurious, due to the high prices of sugar and fruit. However, it is always good to have a few jars in stock, and whoever has his own orchard and apiary can buy this one. too much to allow and show off your skills, because frying preserves is really an art. It is about appearance, color, taste and durability. All activities must be carried out extremely carefully, cleanly and with patience ".

The art of frying preserves ...

Here are some practical tips from the same book.

1. The fruit should be selected the most plump, not too ripe, from a dry harvest, and then fried immediately
2. Fry in wide stone saucepans to give the fruit airy
3. You take as much sugar as there are fruit
4. Do not stir the spoon, just shake it gently
5. Place the preserves carefully in the jars, which must be very cleanly washed and dried, so as not to damage them.
6. Put tissue paper on top, tie with parchment paper
7. Keep the jars in a cool and dry place.

And here you will find quite an original recipe for "Watermelon jam":

1 kg of watermelon
1 kg of sugar
1 vanilla pod
2 cups of water
3 lemons
a teaspoon of citr.

The jam is made of white flesh under the green skin. Peel thoroughly, cut into lengths and cook in water until piercing with a straw. Then strain and drain. Make a syrup, add the boiled watermelon, and when it is fried well, squeeze the lemon juice or add a teaspoon of acid, add vanilla. The kvass gives the jam a nice green color. Cold fold into jars.

And as Elżbieta teaches us through the series "Practical Life" at the expense of the "Bluszcz" Publishing House.

Z tej broszurki poznamy także etymologię słowa "dżem":

Vodkas and liqueurs ...

Of course, Piątkowa's offer includes some practical tips for gourmets of stronger alcoholic beverages.

"Tinctures are vodkas that are obtained by pouring spirit over fruits such as: blueberries, walnuts, cherries, apricots, plums, apples, pears, dogwood, mountain ash and blackthorn. The goodness of the tincture depends on the goodness of the spirit and the time of its appearance. ".

A few tips:
1. The spirit must be of the best quality. You can also use good plain vodka.
2. Fruit must be soaked in spirit 4-6 weeks, fruit peel 4-6 days, exposed to the sun.
3. It takes 3 liters of spirit for 5 kg of fruit
4. Each tincture is to be filtered through tissue paper before pouring into bottles, sometimes even twice.
5. The water for taking the tinctures apart is to be boiled and cooled down. Juicy fruit liqueurs are not taken apart with water, or only in a small amount.
6. The tincture may or may not be sweetened. If it is sweetened, the sugar is either put into the bottle immediately, or after the spirit has been poured out of the fruit, it is mixed with syrup.

Liqueur is a highly alcoholic tincture, strongly sweetened with syrup made of 1/2 liter of water and 1/2 kg of sugar per 1 liter of spirit.
Here is our chosen recipe:

Lemon liqueur:
1 liter of spirit
1/2 liter of water
75 grams of sugar
peel of 2 lemons

Slice lemon peels thinly, put in a bottle and pour 1 / 4l of spirit, leave for a week. Make a syrup, pour the skin extract and 3.4 l of spirit into it. When it settles down, pour into bottles.

Other interesting ways of making wines will be presented to us by the authors associated with the Bluszcz Publishing House.

Bless you!

In this way, we start a series of stories about classic cookbooks that were on the shelves of our grandparents and grandmothers, more culinary stories - not only about very rare books or exclusive leather-bound editions.

Enjoy your meal!

Our online antiquarian bookstore invites you to enrich your book collection with original cookbooks and their reprints.

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