Home › Preserving › Apple Juice (To the parings and cores)
Apple Juice (To the parings and cores)
To the parings and cores of apples made ready for canning, add a few whole apples, cut in quarters and water to cover. Cover and let cook about half an hour, then pour into a jelly bag to drain. Reheat the juice to the boiling point, then store in sterilized cans, in the usual manner. Pressure may be used on the jelly bag to secure the last of the juice, or the pulp may be reboiled with water and strained again.
Apple juice may be used in jellies, sherbet, mince meat, etc.
A thrift recipe: the peels and cores left from canning apples hold most of the fruit's pectin, and this extracts it as a stock for later jelly. A few points on units, equipment and storage.
- "Cans" means glass jarsHome canning books of this period use "can" for any sealed jar. Use standard Mason-type jars with new two-piece lids or fresh rubber-ringed bails.
- Process rather than simply hot-fillThe instruction to reheat to boiling and fill sterilized jars was standard practice, but current guidance for apple juice is to fill hot jars to within 1/4 inch of the rim and process in a boiling-water bath — 5 minutes for pints and quarts. Apple juice is high-acid, so botulism is not the concern; unprocessed jars fail by mold and yeast.
- Freezing is the easier routeIf the juice is destined for jelly within a few months, cool it and freeze in measured quart portions. Prolonged or repeated heating tends to weaken pectin, so a frozen extract is generally the safer bet for setting power.
- Work fast on the paringsCut peels and cores brown quickly once exposed. Drop them into the pot as you go, or hold them in water with a squeeze of lemon, if you want the clearest, brightest juice.
- Windfalls and underripe fruit are bestThe "few whole apples" added should be tart and slightly underripe — that is where the pectin and acid are. Sweet ripe eating apples give a juice that will not set into jelly without added pectin.
- About the jelly bagA double layer of damp cheesecloth in a colander, or a jelly bag on a stand, does the same work. Pressing gives more juice but forces fine pulp through, so a pressed extraction goes cloudy — fine for sherbet, mincemeat or a second-run jelly, not for a clear jelly.
- Second extractionThe reboiled pulp yields a weaker juice with less pectin. Keep it in a separate jar and label it, or a later jelly batch will refuse to set.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; yield depends entirely on how much paring and core you have, so measure the juice before planning a jelly batch. Set can be judged with the traditional alcohol test: stir a teaspoonful of cooled juice into a tablespoon of rubbing alcohol and see whether it clots into a mass. Discard the test sample.
Books like this one appeared in the decade or two either side of 1900, when glass jars with reliable closures had become cheap enough for ordinary households and home canning was framed as both economy and civic virtue. The recipe's logic is pure thrift: apple skin and core are where the pectin sits, so the waste from a morning's canning becomes the setting agent for the winter's jellies — the same reasoning behind old-fashioned apple pectin stock, which was for generations the only pectin a cook had before commercial liquid and powdered extracts arrived on grocery shelves in the 1910s and 1920s.