Home › Preserving › Plum and Crab Apple Jelly
Plum and Crab Apple Jelly
Cook the plums with a little water until tender, then drain in a bag. Add water to the crab apples and cook until tender throughout, then drain. Take three fourths a cup of sugar to each cup of juice; boil the juice twenty minutes, add the sugar, heated in the oven, and let boil all over. Sometimes a little longer boiling is needed, but not often. Wild plums are said to give good results. The two varieties of juice may be combined in such proportion as is desired.
A no-pectin jelly that relies on the crab apples to set the plums. The whole thing turns on judging the finish by behaviour rather than by clock time.
- "Boil all over" means a full rolling boil"Boil all over" most likely describes a boil covering the whole surface rather than a simmer at the edges. After the sugar goes in, judge the finish by the sheet test -- the jelly falling from a cold spoon in two joined drops -- or by 220F, which is 8F above the boiling point of water at sea level and should be adjusted downward for altitude.
- Why the juice boils firstTwenty minutes of boiling before the sugar concentrates the juice and its pectin, so the sugar stage stays short. Long boiling after the sugar goes in tends to darken the colour and degrade pectin; the recipe's remark that a little longer boiling is sometimes needed "but not often" is consistent with that.
- Crab apples are the setting agentCrab apples are high in pectin and acid and are doing most of the setting work here; plum pectin varies by variety and falls as the fruit ripens. The recipe leaves the blend entirely to the cook, noting only that wild plums are "said to give good results" -- likely because they are tarter and firmer than orchard fruit.
- Heating the sugarWarm the sugar in a low oven before adding it. Warm sugar dissolves without dropping the juice off the boil, shortening the cooking. The recipe gives no temperature or time, and the step is largely optional with modern fine-grain sugar.
- Sugar ratioThree-quarters cup sugar to one cup juice is a standard old-style proportion, roughly 5 oz to 8 fl oz. Do not reduce it: the sugar is structural in a no-added-pectin jelly, and less of it gives syrup.
- The jelly bagLet it drip undisturbed, ideally several hours or overnight. Squeezing forces pulp through and gives cloudy jelly. Unbleached muslin, a doubled flour-sack towel or four layers of cheesecloth all work.
- Fruit preparationThe recipe does not say how the fruit is cut. Crab apples for jelly are usually quartered rather than peeled or cored, since skin and core are rich in pectin, and plums can go in whole or halved with the stones in. "A little water" means barely enough to keep the fruit from catching.
- SealingJelly of this period was commonly finished with melted paraffin. Current practice is to pour boiling-hot jelly into hot sterilised half-pint jars, leave a quarter inch of headspace and process five to ten minutes in a boiling-water bath.
- YieldNo quantity of fruit is given. As a working figure, four cups of mixed juice with three cups of sugar makes roughly four half-pint jars. Keep batches small, a few cups of juice at a time, since large volumes are slow to reach the setting point.
This comes from an era when a cook who wanted plum jelly had to borrow the set from another fruit. Crab apples, currants and green apples were the standard donors, and books of this period print paired jellies on exactly that principle. The instruction to heat the sugar in the oven is a relic of coal- and wood-range cookery, where recovering a hard boil after adding cold sugar could cost real time and fuel. The nod to wild plums is worth noting too: American wild plums, gathered from hedgerows and fencelines rather than bought, are sharper and firmer than orchard fruit and were often said to make the better jelly.