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Boiled Cider Apple Sauce
Pare, quarter, and core enough apples to make four quarts; throw the quartered apples into cold water as each is prepared. When all are ready, drain, add two quarts of boiled cider, cover, and let boil until the apples are tender.
The time is not long but varies with the variety of apples used. Do not uncover, as while covered the apples remain at the top of the dish, and burning is avoided. Store in cans as in all canning. Sweet cider may be used in place of boiled cider.
Boiled Cider Apple Sauce (Sweet Apples) Prepare sweet apples as above. Cook in the cider until the pieces of apple are tender and look clear. It will take two or three hours to cook sweet apples tender. Let the saucepan stand on an asbestos mat while cooking. Store in cans in the usual manner.
The cooking here is sound and the flavour idea is a good one, but two elements of the original cannot be carried across: the asbestos mat and the canning instruction, which gives no jar treatment, no processing method and no time.
- The canning step is unusable"Store in cans as in all canning" assumes the reader already knows a house method, and none is recorded here. There is no jar preparation, no headspace, no boiling-water processing time and no seal check, so nothing in the text establishes that the sealed jars were ever brought to a temperature that would make them shelf stable. For any jars you intend to keep, follow a current tested boiling-water-bath procedure for apple products rather than this page.
- Asbestos matA perforated asbestos pad set between burner and pan was standard equipment for long, low simmering in this period. Asbestos is a known carcinogen and these mats shed fibres as they age. Any surviving one should be disposed of, not used.
- Boiled ciderSweet cider reduced by roughly seven to one to a dark, tart syrup with the consistency of thin molasses. It is still made commercially in New England and sold by the pint. It is not the same as apple cider vinegar, and "cider" in this book means unfermented juice, not the alcoholic drink.
- QuantitiesFour quarts of pared, quartered apples is about five to six pounds of whole fruit. Two quarts of boiled cider against that is a great deal of concentrated syrup; using sweet cider, as the recipe permits, gives a much milder and cheaper result.
- Keeping the lid onThe instruction not to uncover is the working point of the recipe. As the text has it, while the dish is covered the apples stay at the top and burning is avoided. Leave it alone until the pieces are tender.
- Two kinds of apple, two timingsThe first version says only that the time is not long and varies with the apples; tart cooking apples will generally collapse quickly. The sweet apples of the second version are firmer and lower in acid; the two to three hours quoted is not an error, and the point is the change in appearance, from opaque to clear, as the slices candy in the syrup.
Boiled cider was a New England farm staple: at pressing time a portion of the sweet juice went straight into a kettle and was cooked down for hours into a keeping syrup, sweet and sharp at once, which stood in for sugar in pies, mincemeat and apple butter through the winter. Cooking apples in it rather than in water and sugar is the older, thriftier practice, and the acid and the concentrated sugars of the cider were themselves understood as preservatives. The sweet-apple variant, with its long slow cooking until the fruit turns clear, sits on the border between sauce and preserve and is close in method to the apple butters and cider-cooked sweetmeats of the same tradition. The asbestos mat, casually mentioned, was ordinary kitchen kit from the late nineteenth century until well into the twentieth.