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Ma's Old Fashioned Jelly




Source of Recipe


Becky Horton


Recipe Introduction


From the time I was about 10 years old, one of the main jobs I had during the summer was to keep my mother well supplied with whatever kind of berry that hapened to be ripe. The summer started with strawberries in early June, dewberries in July, and August finished with almost a full month of picking wonderful black berries. Mother always cleaned the berries right away and gave me a heaping bowl with pure cream and lots of sugar. This tasted the same as the richest ice cream, with without the frozen part. I think mom knew that the more she made me this treat right away, the more willing I would be to go right back out to pick some more!

Mother kept her jelly kettle going all summer and fall as she would start the end of September making jelloy out of the first fall apples, and the grapes that were deep red, just before frost hit the grapes and turned them purple. This jelly was a beautiful red and she had special uses for it. Another jelly that mom made in the fall was yellow tomato jelly. It was her favorite on hot bisquits.

You may wonder, what mom did with all this jelly? First and foremost, she gave most of it away. What was left she would make all kinds of good things all winter long with (much of which she gave away also!) Palachinta, the Hungarian version of crepes, if they werent filled with her creamy homemade cottage cheese, were filled with her grape jelly. She also made jelly rolls with the red grape jelly and best of all, she would make a chocolate hickory nut cake (guess who picked, broke and shelled the hickory nuts! HA!) and used the strawberry jelly to fill the center of the cake before it was frosted with chocolate icing and sprinkled with more hickory nuts.

One summer, when my sister-in-law was traveling to the 1958 assembly in New York city, she stopped to visit mom and dad and brought with her some of her friends from Phoenix. Mom served a meal to them and topped it off with the chocolate cake. Even after these many years, my sister-in-law still remembers that cake with its filling of strawberry jelly and with it the love with which it was served.