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Spiced Crab Apples
Pick over, wash and drain firm crab apples, do not remove the stems. (Apples must not be too ripe). For eight pounds of fruit allow four pounds of sugar, one quart vinegar, one-fourth cup whole cloves, one-fourth cup stick cinnamon broken in pieces. Boil sugar, vinegar and spices ten minutes. Strain and tie spices loosely in a piece of cheese cloth. Put fruit in strained liquor, also bag of spices, and cook slowly until fruit can be easily pierced with a small wooden skewer (tooth-pick). Remove fruit and fill a sterilized stone jar. Simmer liquor slowly until reduced to half the original quantity; pour over fruit. Lay bag of spices on top; seal and store.
The proportions here are sound old pickling practice, but the finish is not: the fruit goes into an unprocessed stoneware crock and is "sealed and stored" with no heat processing and no cold storage. Read the notes below before you decide what to do with it.
- Why it fails as writtenNothing in the method brings the filled, closed jar to a temperature that destroys mould and yeast, and a lidded stone crock does not produce a vacuum seal. Fruit put up this way depended on a cold cellar and on the keeper watching the crock, not on a shelf-stable seal. Use a current tested recipe with a specified water-bath processing time if you want shelf-stable spiced crab apples.
- The acidity is not knownA quart of vinegar sounds like plenty until it is diluted by eight pounds of juicy fruit and four pounds of sugar, and the vinegar of the period was of unstated strength. The original gives no way to verify the finished pH, which is the whole basis of safe fruit pickling.
- "Stone jar"A glazed stoneware crock, the standard vessel for pickles and preserves before mason jars were universal. The lid was a plate, cloth, or wooden cover, sometimes sealed with wax or a layer of fat -- none of it an airtight closure by modern standards.
- Crab applesThe fruit meant here is a true cooking crab -- Transcendent, Hyslop, Siberian -- small, hard, and very high in acid and pectin. Ornamental crabs from a modern street tree are a different proposition, often tiny and astringent, and the deliberately underripe fruit the recipe calls for is what keeps the apples whole rather than collapsing.
- The stemsLeaving the stems on is not decoration alone. It gives you something to lift the fruit by, and an unbroken skin is far less likely to burst during the slow cooking.
- Whole spices, boiled then strainedA quarter cup each of whole cloves and broken cinnamon stick is a heavy hand by modern taste, and the ten-minute boil followed by straining exists to extract flavour while keeping the syrup clear. Ground spice would cloud it.
- The skewer test"Easily pierced with a small wooden skewer" is the only doneness cue given, and it is the right one -- cooked much past that point the apples begin to break down in the syrup.
- YieldEight pounds of fruit with four pounds of sugar and a quart of vinegar is a farmhouse batch, filling several quarts. It is not a scale most kitchens want, and the recipe scales down proportionally without trouble.
Spiced and pickled fruit sat at the sweet-sour end of the nineteenth-century American table, served alongside roast meat and poultry in the same role a cranberry sauce or chutney plays now, and sugar-and-vinegar syrups spiced with clove and cinnamon were applied to peaches, pears, watermelon rind and crab apples alike. Crab apples were the obvious candidate because they were everywhere: hard, sour, too small and too tart for eating out of hand, and abundant on farm hedgerows and in dooryards, so the fruit cost nothing while the sugar and spice did the work.