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Spiced Crab Apple Jelly
5 pounds crab apples 1 pint water 1 tablespoonful whole cloves 1 tablespoonful mace blades 1 tablespoonful cinnamon bark in bits } 1 pint vinegar tied in bag Cook the crab apples with the water, vinegar, and spice until soft; drain and finish as apple jelly. Use three fourths a cup of sugar to each cup of juice.
A short, confident recipe that assumes you already know how apple jelly is made. The hinge is the straining: let the cooked fruit drip on its own, because pressing the bag forces starch and pulp through and gives a cloudy jelly.
- The liquid is mostly vinegarHalf the liquid is vinegar -- One pint water plus one pint vinegar to five pounds of fruit. Cider vinegar suits it; the sharpness is the point of a spiced jelly.
- Mace bladesThese are the dried lacy covering of the nutmeg seed, sold whole rather than ground. If you cannot find blades, a whole nutmeg cracked into a few pieces is the nearest substitute; ground mace will muddy the juice even inside a bag.
- Spice in a bagThe bracket in the original text means all three spices go into one cloth bag, which cooks with the fruit and is lifted out before straining. Cheesecloth tied with string, or a large tea infuser, does the job.
- Crab apples need no peeling or coringStem, wash, quarter, and cook them skins and all. The cores and skins carry most of the pectin, which is why crab apples were the preferred jelly fruit.
- "Finish as apple jelly"Drip the cooked fruit through a jelly bag or double cheesecloth for several hours without squeezing, measure the clear juice, add three quarters cup sugar per cup of juice, and boil hard until it sheets from a spoon or reads 220F on a candy thermometer (a couple of degrees lower at high altitude).
- Batch sizeBoil no more than six to eight cups of juice at a time. A deep pot of jelly boils more slowly, overcooks before it sets, and turns dark and gummy.
- SealingThe period practice was hot paraffin poured over the surface. Use half-pint jars processed five minutes in a boiling water bath instead; paraffin seals fail and let mould grow under the wax.
- YieldFive pounds of crab apples gives roughly six to seven cups of juice, or about six half-pint jars.
- ServingA spiced jelly is a condiment, not a breakfast preserve. It is meant for pork, ham, goose and cold roast meats.
Crab apples earned their place in the early twentieth-century preserving canon on chemistry rather than flavor: they are high in both pectin and acid, the two things a jelly must have, so they set reliably in an era before commercial pectin was in every kitchen. Spiced and vinegared versions like this one belong to the older tradition of sweet-sour accompaniments to meat, a line that runs back through English pickled and preserved fruits and sits beside the mint jellies, spiced pears and pickled peaches of the same period. The clipped instruction to "finish as apple jelly" is characteristic of domestic-science era manuals, which taught a master method once and then cross-referenced it for the rest of the chapter, and the ratio of three quarters cup sugar to each cup of juice reflects the standardized, measurable approach those writers were promoting against older cooking by guess.