Home › Preserving › Apple Jam
Apple Jam
Select apples of tart flavor; pare, quarter, and core the fruit; weigh the prepared apples and allow three fourths a pound of sugar to each pound of fruit. Add water to the parings and cores, cover and let boil about half an hour, then drain the liquid over the apples; let cook until the apples are soft, then strain through a fine-meshed sieve; add the sugar and let cook until thick and clear. The juice and grated rind of two or three lemons or oranges, or the addition of two or three quinces, to a half-peck of apples, may be used to give changes in flavor, and, in the case of the quinces, texture. If scales for weighing be not at hand, measure the cooked pulp and allow three fourths a cup of sugar to a cup of pulp.
Apple, Peach, Pear, and Quince Jam Pare the fruit and cut it in bits, use three fourths to a full pound of sugar to a pound of fruit.
This is a purée-style jam rather than a chunky one: the apples are cooked down, sieved, then sweetened and boiled to a set. The whole method depends on getting pectin out of the parts most cooks throw away.
- The hinge: don't skip the peel-and-core liquidApple skins and cores are richer in pectin than the flesh, though the flesh has some too. Simmering them in water for half an hour and pouring that liquid over the fruit is what helps the jam set without added pectin. Discard the solids after straining.
- Choose genuinely tart applesGranny Smith, Bramley, Newtown Pippin or any firm cooking apple. Modern dessert apples such as Gala and Fuji are low in both acid and pectin and will give a loose, cloying jam.
- Half a peckA peck of apples runs 10 to 12 lb, so half a peck is roughly 5 to 6 lb of whole fruit — about 4 lb once pared and cored. That is the scale at which two or three quinces or the juice of two or three lemons makes sense.
- Sugar ratioThree quarters of a pound of sugar per pound of prepared fruit, or three quarters of a cup per cup of sieved pulp. The volume version is the safety net when there are no scales; it is close enough because cooked apple pulp is dense and fairly uniform.
- Knowing when it is done"Thick and clear" is a jam set: 220F on a candy thermometer at sea level, or a spoonful that wrinkles when pushed on a chilled plate. Subtract about 2F per 1,000 feet of elevation.
- ScorchingOnce the sugar goes in, the mixture is a thick purée with nothing to protect the bottom of the pan. Use a wide heavy pot, keep it at a working boil rather than a gentle one, and stir across the base constantly toward the end.
- QuincesQuinces are hard, astringent and very high in pectin, and need longer cooking than apples, so cook them with the fruit from the start rather than adding them late. Long cooking with sugar can turn quince flesh pink, so the jam may take on a pinkish cast, and the recipe credits the quinces with a change in texture as well as flavour.
- Storage, which the recipe leaves outLadle hot into clean half-pint jars and process in a boiling-water bath for 10 minutes for shelf-stable jars; otherwise refrigerate and use within a month. Paraffin-and-cover sealing, common in preserving books of this general period, is no longer recommended.
- YieldAbout 4 lb of prepared apples with sugar gives somewhere in the range of six to eight half-pint jars, depending how far you reduce it.
Apple jam of this kind sits between two things a modern shopper buys separately: apple butter and apple jelly. Because the fruit is sieved rather than left in pieces, what comes out is a smooth spread, and the parings-and-cores decoction is a household version of commercial pectin extraction. The instruction to weigh the fruit, with a volume fallback "if scales for weighing be not at hand," is a good marker of the period: American home kitchens were shifting from weight to cup measures, and preserving was one of the last places where weight held on, since the sugar-to-fruit ratio determines whether the jam keeps. The suggestion of lemon, orange or quince "to give changes in flavor" reflects a practical reality of the apple harvest — a cellar full of one fruit, and a cook looking for ways to make the winter's shelf of jars taste like more than one thing.