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Boiled Cider Apple Sauce
Pare, quarter and core apples sufficient to fill a gallon porcelain kettle, put in it a half gallon boiled cider, let it boil. Wash the apples and put in kettle, place a plate over them, and boil steadily 'but not rapidly until they are thoroughly cooked, testing by taking one from under the edge of the plate with a fork. Do not remove the plate until done, or the apples will sink to the bottom and burn. Apples may be cooked in sweet cider in the same way.- Mrs. W. W. W.
A two-ingredient preserve that lives or dies on the boiled cider. The plate laid over the fruit is not a quirk of the period — it is the whole technique.
- Boiled cider is not ciderIt is sweet cider reduced several times over -- figures around seven to one are commonly quoted -- to a dark, tart syrup with the consistency of thin molasses. It is still made commercially in New England; ordinary apple cider or juice will not give the colour, body or concentrated acidity the recipe depends on. Cider vinegar is not a substitute.
- The kettleA gallon porcelain kettle means an enamelled cast-iron or enamelled steel pot of about 4 quarts. The enamel matters here: apples and reduced cider are acidic enough to pick up metal off bare iron or aluminium. Stainless steel or an enamelled Dutch oven works.
- The plateThis is the hinge. A heatproof plate set directly on the fruit keeps every quarter submerged in the syrup, so the pieces poach rather than scorch on the bottom, and it holds their shape. Lift it only to test with a fork through the gap at the edge, as the text says, and put it straight back.
- Half a gallon of syrupTwo quarts of boiled cider to a gallon kettle of apple quarters is a great deal of expensive syrup by modern standards. The proportion can be cut to a quart or less provided the fruit stays covered under the plate; the finished sauce will simply be lighter.
- "Boil steadily but not rapidly"A bare simmer, with the surface just moving. A hard boil will break the quarters into mush and the sugars in the reduced cider will catch and burn on the bottom before the fruit is through.
- Timing and applesNo time is given because it depends entirely on the variety. Firm cooking apples -- Northern Spy, Baldwin, Braeburn, Granny Smith -- will hold their quarters far longer than softer eating apples, which collapse quickly and are the wrong fruit for this. Test as the recipe directs rather than by the clock.
- No sugar, and none neededAll the sweetness comes from the reduced cider, which is why the recipe adds none. The result is darker, tarter and far more concentrated than modern applesauce, closer to a fruit conserve than a side dish.
- Yield and keepingNothing here amounts to a tested canning process: refrigerate the finished sauce and use it within a week or two, or freeze it. For shelf storage, follow a current tested water-bath procedure for apple products.
Boiled cider — sweet cider reduced over a fire until it is a thick, dark syrup — was a standard sweetener in apple-growing districts of the northern United States long before cane sugar was cheap. It turns up in nineteenth-century American cookery as the sweetening for pies, mincemeat, cakes and preserves of exactly this kind. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, first issued in Ohio around 1877 and reprinted heavily through the 1880s, was compiled from contributions by named housekeepers, which is why this one carries Mrs. W. W. W.'s initials rather than an author's byline. The closing line offers sweet cider as an alternative to the boiled syrup.