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Apple Juice (Quarter a quantity of apples)
Quarter a quantity of apples, removing any imperfections that may be present, cover with water, then cover the receptacle and let cook until the apples are soft throughout; drain in a cloth, reheat to the boiling-point, and turn into sterilized jars, filling each to overflow. Put on new rubber rings and sterilized covers and tighten at once. Crab apple juice, quince juice, etc., may be canned in the same way.
This is open-kettle canning: hot juice poured into hot jars and sealed with no processing afterward. That method was standard in 1900 and has been withdrawn from every current canning guideline, so the sequence below is offered as explanation rather than instruction.
- No processing step at allThe jars are sealed by the heat of the juice itself and never heated again. Nothing in the procedure holds the filled, sealed jar at a known temperature for a known time, which is the entire point of a modern water-bath process. Any tested current recipe for apple juice will specify a bath time by jar size and altitude.
- The seal is unverified"Tighten at once" on a hot jar produces a seal that may look sound and is not. Without a bath, there is no vacuum formed by cooling headspace against a vented lid, so failures are common and often invisible until the jar spoils on the shelf.
- What actually goes wrong hereApple, crab apple and quince juice are all high-acid, so this is a spoilage problem rather than a botulism problem: yeasts, moulds and heat-tolerant spoilage bacteria surviving in an under-processed jar, fermenting it or growing a mould cap. Some of those moulds on pome fruit produce patulin, a toxin that heating does not remove, which is why sound fruit matters at the start.
- "Filling each to overflow"Deliberate zero headspace was the old way of excluding air. Modern practice leaves a measured headspace instead, because the vacuum on cooling is what does the work.
- New rubber ringsThe instruction assumes jars sealed with a separate rubber gasket, whether under a glass lid and bail or a zinc screw cap, with the ring replaced at every use. Current two-piece lids seal on a bonded compound and the flat disc is single-use.
- Straining in a clothThe cooked pulp is hung in a jelly bag or several layers of cheesecloth and left to drip. Squeezing gives more juice but a cloudier result.
- If you want to make itExtract the juice as described and drink it fresh, or freeze it. For shelf-stable jars, use a current tested recipe with a specified process time.
Fruit juice earns a place in a preserving book because in the era before home freezers it was, by most accounts, the raw material for out-of-season jelly: canned apple or crab apple juice could be boiled with sugar in January, and quince juice was said to be prized for the pectin and perfume it lent to blander fruits. Apple juice put up this way is also often described as a sickroom staple and a temperance drink, standing in for cider once fermentation was something to be prevented rather than encouraged. The open-kettle method used here dominated American household canning through the nineteenth century and lost ground only gradually in the twentieth, as state agricultural extension services began publishing tested processing times for water-bath and pressure canners; it was discouraged for vegetables relatively early but continued to be tolerated for high-acid fruits and juices in household guidance for some time afterward. Note the assumption that every reader owns rubber rings and buys new ones each season, a detail that dates the page as precisely as any calendar.