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Apple Jelly
Apple juice made from parings and cores of apples may be used. See "Canned Apple Juice." Or apples freed of imperfections and cut in quarters may be used. Cover the fruit with water and set over the fire to cook until soft throughout; drain in a bag. Let the juice boil twenty minutes; add hot sugar in the proportion of three fourths a cup to each II2 cup of juice taken, and let boil from one to six minutes. Skim before and after the sugar is added.
A classic no-pectin jelly that relies entirely on the apples themselves. The method is sound; only the measurements and doneness cues need translating.
- The sugar ratioThe proportion as printed is unclear — the figure for the juice has lost its fraction. The standard ratio for apple jelly of this period is three-quarters of a cup of sugar to each cup of strained juice, and that is the safe assumption; taste and set will not suffer from erring slightly low on sugar.
- Parings and cores are the pointSkin and core carry the bulk of an apple's pectin, so the thrift here is also good technique. Use firm, slightly underripe cooking apples; fully ripe or mealy fruit gives a syrup that never sets.
- Hot sugarThe recipe calls for the sugar to be added hot; warming it gently before adding keeps the boil from stalling. This matters more with the short final boil the recipe calls for.
- Do not squeeze the bagDraining the bag -- The recipe says only to drain in a bag. Pressing the pulp forces fine solids through and gives cloudy jelly, so let it hang several hours or overnight.
- "One to six minutes" needs a testThat range is wide because pectin strength varies. Judge by the sheet test — jelly falling from a cold spoon in a single curtain rather than drops — or 220F on a thermometer at sea level.
- SealingThe recipe gives no sealing instructions. Use half-pint canning jars and a five-minute boiling-water bath, or refrigerate and use within a month.
- YieldThe recipe specifies no quantity of fruit. As a rough guide, about 4 lb of apples with water to cover will give in the region of 4 cups of juice, or four to five half-pints of finished jelly.
Apple jelly is the household chemistry lesson of the American preserving cupboard: apples are so high in pectin and acid that they will gel with nothing but sugar and boiling, which is why nineteenth- and early twentieth-century books used them as the base for jellies made from fruits that had no setting power of their own. The instruction to work from parings and cores places this squarely in the economy of a period when apples came in by the barrel or the peck and nothing was thrown out — the pie was made, and the trimmings went to jelly. Commercial bottled pectin only reached American kitchens in the late 1910s, so a book of this vintage teaches the cook to find pectin in the fruit, and the twenty-minute preliminary boil of the juice before sugar is added is exactly that: concentration to strengthen a set no packet was going to guarantee.