Home › The Principles of Cookery › APPLE GINGER (another way)
APPLE GINGER (another way)
IMITATION OF PRESERVED GINGER.--Take four pounds of apples, weighed after they have been pared and cored, and cut them into quarters; make a syrup of two pounds of sugar boiled in one pint of water, and pour it over the fruit. Let the apples stand in this two days,then add four pounds of loaf sugar, and the chopped rind and juice of three lemons. Put into a muslin bag two ounces of bruised ginger, and half a tea-spoonful of cayenne. Let all simmer until the fruit is soft, but not broken, and the juice clear; add a glass of gin. Time to simmer, about an hour. Probable cost, 2s. 6d. Sufficient for four one-pound jars.
This is a candied apple preserve engineered to mimic the texture and heat of preserved stem ginger. Nearly everything about it depends on sugar working slowly rather than heat working fast.
- The hinge: never let it boilThe apples must simmer, barely trembling, for about an hour so the quarters stay whole and translucent while the syrup clears. A rolling boil turns them to sauce and the whole point of the recipe is lost.
- The two-day soak is not optionalStanding in the syrup for two days draws water out of the apple and replaces it with sugar, which is what gives the fruit its firm, slightly chewy, ginger-like bite. Skip it and you have stewed apple.
- Total sugarTwo pounds in the first syrup plus four pounds added later comes to six pounds of sugar against four pounds of prepared fruit. That ratio is deliberate and it is also what preserves the finished product.
- Loaf sugarRefined white sugar, sold in the period as a hard cone to be broken up. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct equivalent.
- Bruised gingerWhole dried ginger root, cracked with a rolling pin or the flat of a knife to open the fibres. Two ounces is roughly 55 g. Ground ginger is not a substitute here — it will cloud the syrup and cannot be lifted out in the bag.
- A glass of ginA wine glass in period measure is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz (roughly 60 ml). The recipe adds it after the simmering is done, which would leave more of the spirit in the pot.
- Choose apples that hold their shapeA cooking apple bred to fall (Bramley and the like) will disintegrate during the long simmer. Firm dessert or dual-purpose fruit — Granny Smith, Braeburn — keeps its quarters intact.
- Yield and keepingFour one-pound jars, as stated. Fill hot into hot sterilised jars and seal; the sugar concentration is high, but once opened keep it refrigerated.
- The cayenneHalf a teaspoon across six pounds of sugar reads as warmth on the finish rather than chilli heat. It is doing the job of the pungency real preserved ginger supplies.
Preserved ginger — young rhizome candied in syrup — reached British kitchens as an expensive import, and imitations of it were a standing exercise in nineteenth-century preserving. Apple was the natural stand-in: cheap, available by the bushel in autumn, and structurally willing to take on sugar and hold its shape through a long slow simmer. The addition of cayenne alongside the dried root shows what the cook was chasing, since dried ginger alone lacks the sharp bite of the fresh candied article. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, compiled for late-Victorian middle-class households, is full of this kind of thrift-with-ambition, and the costing of 2s. 6d. for four jars is part of the book's standing practice of printing a probable cost for essentially every recipe.