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APPLE JAM (another way)
Pare, core, and slice three pounds of apples. Place them in a preserving-pan with a little cinnamon, two or three cloves, the juice of two lemons, two and a half pounds of sugar, and just enough water to keep them from burning. Stir them continually with a wooden spoon, until they are reduced to pulp. Pour this into jars, and cover closely. It will not keep so well as jam made by the preceding recipe, but it is more quickly made. Time to boil, three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost, 1s. 8d. Allow one pound of fruit for a one-pound jar.
A quick stirred jam rather than a long-boiled preserve, and the book is honest that speed costs keeping quality. Everything here works in a modern kitchen with one caveat about storage.
- Choose the appleA tart cooking apple such as Bramley breaks down to pulp and carries plenty of natural pectin and acid; dessert apples hold their shape and set poorly. The recipe does not say whether the three pounds is weighed before or after paring; if before, peel and core will take a noticeable amount off the prepared weight.
- The preserving-panA wide, heavy pan with sloping sides, meant to evaporate water fast. Any wide heavy-based stainless pan does the job; avoid untreated aluminium or bare cast iron, which react with the lemon juice.
- Stir continually means itWith only a splash of water and 2.5 lb of sugar, this mixture scorches easily once the apples collapse. Keep the heat moderate and the wooden spoon moving across the base, not just around the surface.
- Whole spicesUse a cinnamon stick and whole cloves and fish them out before potting; ground spice at this quantity turns the jam gritty and muddy in colour. Two or three cloves is deliberately restrained, so resist adding more.
- Judging the setThree-quarters of an hour is a guide, not a test. Look for 220F (105C) on a sugar thermometer, or chill a spoonful on a cold saucer and push it with a finger to see whether it wrinkles.
- Sugar ratio and keepingAt about 5 parts sugar to 6 parts fruit this sits below the roughly equal-weight ratio that makes jam self-preserving, which may be part of why the book warns it will not keep as well; the shorter boil and lower evaporation will also count. Pot into hot sterilised jars and either refrigerate and use within a few weeks, or process filled jars in a boiling-water bath following current guidance.
- Yield and costAbout three one-pound jars, as the closing line indicates. The 1s 8d is a late-Victorian retail figure and has no useful modern equivalent.
Cassell's gives more than one apple jam because apples were cheap and easy to preserve: they carry their own pectin and acid, so they set without help at a time when commercial pectin was not sold to households. This version is the frugal, hurried one, distinguished from the preceding recipe by a shorter boil, and the dictionary says plainly which trade-off you are making. Sugar duty in Britain was abolished in 1874, and the flood of cheap refined sugar that followed is the background to the sheer volume of jam recipes in domestic manuals of this period. The cinnamon and cloves point back to an older tradition of spiced apple preserves that runs through English cookery long before jam in the modern sense had a name.