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Transcendent Crab-Apple Jelly
Transcendents or any variety of crab-apples, may be prepared as cultivated wild plums, adding flavoring of almond, lemon, peach, pine-apple or vanilla to the jelly in the proportion of one tea-spoon to two pints, or more if it is wished stronger, just before it is done.
This is a cross-reference recipe: the method sits under the wild plum entry, and all that is added here is the fruit and the flavouring. What follows fills in the parts the original assumes you already know.
- What "prepared as cultivated wild plums" meansThe method itself sits elsewhere in the book and is not repeated here. The standard period approach: quarter the fruit without peeling or coring, barely cover with water, simmer until soft, then drip the pulp through a jelly bag overnight, and boil the strained juice with sugar until it sheets from the spoon. Sugar proportions of about three-quarters to a pound per pint of juice are typical of the period, but no proportion is given in this entry.
- Two pintsThe flavouring proportion is given against two pints of finished jelly, not of raw juice. Two pints is four cups, so one teaspoon of extract is a light touch; it is meant to lift the apple, not to read as almond or vanilla.
- Add the flavour off the heatAdd the flavour at the very end -- "just before it is done" is the hinge. Alcohol-based extracts lose volatiles in a rolling boil, which is why the flavouring goes in at the last moment rather than at the start; stirring it in as the pan comes off the burner follows the same logic, though the recipe does not specify off the heat.
- Almond flavouringUse modern almond extract, which is benzaldehyde in alcohol. Nineteenth-century "essence of bitter almonds" was sometimes a home preparation carrying hydrocyanic acid, and is not the same thing as the bottle on the shelf today.
- Transcendent crabsAn old crab-apple cultivar, small and yellow-red, and still grown by heritage orchards. Any tart crab or even underripe cooking apple works: the point is high pectin and high acid, which is why crabs set without added pectin.
- Testing the setThe period test was a spoon sheet or a plate chilled on ice. A thermometer is faster — jelly sets at about 220F at sea level, a degree or so lower for every 500 feet of elevation.
- SealingBuckeye Cookery covers jelly with paper, brandy-dipped, rather than with a modern seal. Current practice is to fill hot jars to a quarter-inch headspace and process in a boiling water bath for ten minutes; paraffin seals let mould in over long storage.
- YieldAbout four pounds of crab-apples gives roughly two pints of juice; the finished number of half-pint jars depends on how far the jelly is boiled down.
Crab-apples were a practical jelly fruit in the American nineteenth-century household: too sour and too astringent for most tastes out of hand, but loaded with pectin and acid, so they set reliably in a period before commercial pectin existed. Transcendent was one of the widely planted named crabs of the era, valued in the upper Midwest for hardiness and for exactly this use. Buckeye Cookery, first published in 1877 and compiled from contributions by practical housekeepers, is full of these terse entries that hang off an earlier method rather than repeating it — a sign the book was written for cooks who already knew how to run a jelly bag. The flavouring list is the interesting part: dosing a plain fruit jelly with almond, lemon, peach, pineapple or vanilla was a way of turning one abundant crop into several different preserves on the winter shelf.