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Gingered Apples
For five pounds of prepared apple, allow five pounds of granulated sugar, five ounces of ginger root, three lemons, and a pint of water. Bruise the ginger root, and put it over the fire with the water. Let it simmer some hours, adding water, when needed, to get a strong decoction of ginger. Wipe the lemons carefully, then grate off the thin yellow rind, and extract the juice. Add these to the pint of ginger water. Remove the pieces of ginger from the water, or tie them in a muslin cloth, and let them remain till the confection is finished.
Add the sugar and the apple. Select tart apples, pare and core, then chop them rather Boil the whole until the bits of apple look clear. Then store in jars. coarse.
A straightforward equal-weight preserve, but the original text has a typesetting scramble at the end and gives no processing instructions. A few things to settle before you start.
- The garbled lineThe word "coarse" belongs to the sentence above it: pare, core and chop the apples rather coarse, then boil the whole until the bits look clear. The final "coarse." after "store in jars" is a compositor's error.
- The ginger decoctionFive ounces of ginger root is a large knob, roughly 140 g. Bruise it with the flat of a knife or a mallet so the fibres split, and simmer it in water for the "some hours" the recipe asks, topping up as it evaporates. What you want at the end is one pint (2 cups) of strongly flavoured liquid, not a pint of water plus whatever is left.
- Fresh, not ground"Ginger root" here means whole root, either the fresh rhizome or the dried whole root sold by the ounce in this period; either can be bruised, simmered and lifted out, with the dried giving a hotter, drier heat. Powdered ginger will not do: it clouds the syrup and cannot be strained out.
- Lemon rindGrate only the yellow zest. Any white pith carried in with it will turn the finished preserve bitter, and the acid you want is already coming from the juice.
- WeightsFive pounds of prepared apple means five pounds after paring and coring, so buy about seven pounds of fruit. Tart, firm varieties hold their shape: Granny Smith, Bramley, Northern Spy.
- Judging "clear"The apple pieces should turn translucent as the syrup thickens towards setting point, around 220F on a candy thermometer at sea level, though the two cues need not coincide exactly; the recipe gives only the visual test. Expect a good half-hour or more of steady boiling with frequent stirring, since a 1:1 sugar mixture scorches easily once it thickens.
- Filling the jars"Store in jars" reflects the open-kettle method, which was standard when this was written and is no longer recommended. Ladle into hot sterilised jars, leave a quarter-inch headspace, and process in a boiling water bath rather than relying on the heat of the preserve to seal the lid.
- YieldAround six pints, or a dozen half-pint jars.
Preserved ginger was one of the more expensive luxuries in a Victorian and Edwardian store cupboard, arriving in stoneware jars from Canton in syrup, and recipes like this one let a household get the flavour at a fraction of the cost by extracting it from a few ounces of the raw root. Apples were the obvious partner: cheap by the bushel in autumn, high in natural pectin so no added setting agent was needed, and mild enough to carry a strong aromatic without fighting it. The technique of drawing a long decoction from bruised roots, and of tying the spent pieces in muslin so they keep perfuming the pan without ending up in the jar, is considerably older than this book.