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Apple Marmalade
Select four pounds of cooking apples; pare and core them, put them in an enameled saucepan with about a quart of sweet cider and two pounds of white sugar. Boil them until the fruit is quite soft. Squeeze it through a colander, and then through a sieve.
A plain fruit butter in all but name: apples cooked down in cider and sugar, then pushed through a sieve. The original assumes you know what to do with it afterwards, and gives no yield, no set test and no storage instruction.
- Sweet ciderIn American books of this period "sweet cider" is unfermented pressed apple juice, not the hard cider of English usage and not the spiced mulled drink. Cloudy unfiltered apple cider from the chilled section is the closest match; filtered apple juice works but tastes thinner.
- The enameled saucepanThe instruction is likely about the fruit rather than tidiness. Apples are acidic enough to react with bare iron or aluminium, giving a metallic taste and a grey cast; enamelled cast iron or stainless steel is the modern equivalent.
- Choice of apple"Cooking apples" means a variety that collapses rather than holding its shape: Bramley, McIntosh, Gravenstein, Cortland. Firm eating apples such as Braeburn or Honeycrisp will need considerably longer to soften and give a less silky result.
- Sugar proportionTwo pounds of sugar to four pounds of apples as bought is about 4.5 cups to a little under 2 kg of fruit, less once pared and cored. That is a moderate ratio for the period; it will not set like jam and is not meant to.
- How long to boilExpect 45 minutes to an hour before the fruit is fully broken down, stirring often once it thickens, since the sugar catches easily on the bottom. Take it off when a spoonful drawn across the pan leaves a track that closes slowly.
- Colander then sieveThe two-stage straining is doing the work of a food mill: the colander catches the coarse pulp, the finer sieve removes the last grittiness. A food mill fitted with a medium plate does both passes in one.
- Reducing after sievingThe purée comes off the sieve looser than it went in. If you want a spreadable marmalade rather than a sauce, return it to the clean pan and cook it down gently, uncovered, until a spoon dragged across the base leaves a clear channel.
- Yield and keepingThe recipe gives no yield; expect several cups of finished marmalade. The recipe stops before any mention of sealing; treat it as a refrigerator preserve, good two or three weeks covered and chilled, and follow a current tested procedure if you intend to can it for the shelf.
Marmalade did not originally mean citrus. The word comes through French from Portuguese marmelada, a stiff paste of quinces (marmelo), and for centuries in English it covered any fruit boiled with sugar to a thick, sievable mass; the narrowing to bitter orange is a later British habit that seems to have been less firmly established in American kitchens. That is why a household book of this kind can file an apple purée under marmalade without comment. The cider is the telling detail: in households that pressed their own apples in autumn, sweet cider was ready to hand at exactly the season when windfall and second-grade apples needed using up, and cooking the fruit in its own juice rather than water concentrated the flavour at no cost. Recipes of this type sit alongside apple butter and apple jelly in the preserving chapters, three ways of turning one glut into something that would last past Christmas.