Jams and jellies and such

[rebrascora]

But, it all works out ok in the end. If the jam is too liquid, I'll just change the name of it and call it "sauce" and serve it up on cake or ice cream!

Yes, a good cook can almost always remarket her "lesser successes" as something else or tweak them to improve the flavour..... not that I am by any means a good cook, but have had plenty of opportunity to rebrand my failures .
As regards using apple to help set jam, I think it may be important to have the right sort of apple.... a good cooker.... (I inherited the apple tree along with the cook book!) and I usually just quarter it and throw it in the pan of boiling fruit and sugar and lemon juice and the squeezed lemon halves and then fish what's left out later. Or you can be less cavalier and put them in a muslin bag. It may be more effective to peel it and just use the peels as @NikAndHerChicks suggested. I might have to try that next time.

 

[Dawnclucks22]

I hope I can try this sometime!

 

[rebrascora]

I accept that mushing up fruit would make a cup of it a standard amount repeatable but I would normally cut rhubarb into inch chunks to make jam and you wouldn't manage to fit many of those into a cup to measure it.
It is just what you are used to I guess.....

A cup is about 250 mls, so four cups is close to a liter.

Thanks, that is good to know, but I find it so alien to think of dry ingredients in terms of volume, (instead of weight) that, whilst I read that as 250mls my brain said it must be 250gms and my first thought was convert that into ounces ie. just over 8 oz, so that I could then get a mental image of what a cup of flour actually looks like.

I'm too old and stuck in my ways to fully embrace metric and let go of my "imperial measurement" start in life, even though I accept that metric is easier and makes more sense.... relearning how you think about things is harder, so I somehow muddle along with two systems because my brain can't manage to abandon the old one and accept the new. I am not alone in this. Most people over 50 here in the UK still find it hard to adjust and probably resent having to..... it may even be one of the factors in Brexit. I'm sure there would be uproar in the USA if someone said you have to abandon your "cups" and weigh everything in grams and have kilometres instead of miles and litres instead of gallons. And of course these measures are usually smaller so you almost always end up paying more for less in the process!..... but them I'm just a wingeing Pom as the Aussies would call me... so don't mind me.

It is just what you are used to.....

 

[Folly's place]

Buying gasoline (petrol?) in Canada is difficult. Much more expensive, and by the liter (litre?) rather than by the gallon. It can all be mind-bending, for sure.
I do measure dry ingredients by the cup, not by weight, even though those pesky TV chefs have their scales out for everything. Not happening in my kitchen!
Mary

 

[rebrascora]

I do measure dry ingredients by the cup, not by weight, even though those pesky TV chefs have their scales out for everything. Not happening in my kitchen

I do see why you would.... a bit like using metric.... it is easier and it makes sense for dry ingredients in particular, but if it's not what you are used to and your recipes are not geared up for it, it's difficult to adapt. Here you can buy jugs that have measurements marked on them that you fill to a certain line for say 8oz of flour or 500g flour and also has markings on it for pints and fluid oz and litres. I'm sure my mother had an old pre metric one that had markings for different ingredients like rice and oats and suet and sultanas so that you filled it to a particular line for 4oz or 8oz of that ingredient and the lines were all different levels for those different ingredients because some like oats and suet were lighter than flour or sugar. I know it must seem totally ludicrous compared to your one simple measure of "a cup" system, but works here very well because a recipe says you need 8oz of flour and 2oz of sugar and 3oz of oats or whatever, you either get the scales out and weigh it or the conversion jug and measure it. And of course those recipes are handed down through the generations and therefore valued and not easily thrown aside in order to introduce a new system.
It's funny how something as basic as how we measure food can be cultural and difficult to understand why anyone would want to do it differently.

 

[Folly's place]

All my recipes are measured in cups, not by weight. Well, not all; there's pound cake, but the old recipe I followed didn't turn out well.
Mary

 

[rebrascora]

All my recipes are measured in cups, not by weight

I assumed that would be the case and of course will be for the vast majority of people in the US, I imagine. You would probably have no more interest in trying to follow my recipes which, like those "pesky chefs", require things to be weighed in lbs and oz or worse still g and kg, than I would have difficulty with yours being in cups. I will admit that it must be laziness on my part, because I am not so stupid that I can't figure it out and similarly, I am sure you are more than capable of weighing ingredients but neither of us feel the need to change, which is fine of course, but perhaps makes swapping recipes pointless..... hence me being reluctant to participate in that element of this thread in the first place.

It is really interesting how something so basic can be divisive though.

 

[SW31]

It’s funny that I use metric all the time except when making a Victoria sandwich cake when I go back to the recipe from school- 4 oz each self raising flour, butter and castor sugar and two eggs. I also use the same ratio for scaling up.

 

[wyoDreamer]

My husbands family has a cake recipe that their grandma always made for Christmas. I was given a copy of the "original recipe" one year so I could make it - with a warning that grandma must have left a "secret" ingredient off the recipe because no-one could duplicate her cake. The recipe called for a 1/2 cup of this, teaspoon of that, and XX pound of flour. In prentices she had written "about 2 cups". I used the weight measure - since I have a kitchen scale. Now it is my job to make Grandma's Frozen Coffee Cake for Christmas, since I am the only one "to get it right".
Although, I still have no idea what is used to frost it. I was told - it's a white Icing. White Icing to me is milk, vanilla and powdered sugar mixed fairly thin so it runs down the side of the cake. NOPE, that is wrong - it needs to be thick. So I tried a Buttercream Frosting, nope - that is too thick. GAH!!

In my opinion, weight is a much more accurate measure than cups, teaspoons and the like. In fact, there is a different measuring cup for liquid than is used for dry ingredients, and some sets hold a different volume than others do. I was given a new set of measuring cups and it seemed that everything I bakes turned out wrong. Turns out the new set was really wonky. 2 of the 1/2 cup scoop measured more than one cup - by a lot; and 3 of the 1/3 cup scoop was less than 1 cup. I relegated that set to the pet food containers.