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Apple Jam
Pare, core, and slice four pounds of good baking apples; put them in a saucepan with three pounds of sifted sugar, and the grated rind and juice of four lemons. Stew gently, stirring constantly until the jam is firm and smooth. Put it into covered jars, and keep it in a dry place. It is a good plan to lay the apples and other ingredients in layers in a stone jar, and place the jar in the oven in the middle of a tin full of water, which is to be replenished as it boils away, until the fruit is tender. Then pour it into a preserving-pan, and boil for twenty minutes. Time to stew, three or four hours. Probable cost, 1s. 10d. One pound of apples will make about one pound of jam.
A plain high-sugar apple preserve with lemon, given in two methods: direct stewing on the stove, or a slow oven bake in a water bath followed by a short hard boil. Both work; the second is gentler and less likely to catch.
- Stir, and mean itApple pulp with three parts sugar to four parts fruit scorches readily once it thickens. Use a wide heavy pan, keep the heat low, and scrape the base rather than the surface. A catch at the bottom will taint the whole batch.
- The oven method's temperatureThe recipe does not say how hot the oven should be; a low setting is implied by the water bath, which is there to keep the jar below scorching heat. Top the tin up before it runs dry, and cook until the apple slices collapse.
- Three or four hours is for the old methodThree or four hours is the book's own stewing time -- On a modern hob, 4 lb of sliced apples with sugar will generally break down and thicken a good deal faster, depending on the variety and how finely you slice.
- Pectin and apple choiceBramleys and other tart cooking apples set well because they are high in pectin and acid; dessert apples give a looser, sweeter jam. If you want insurance, tie the pared cores and peels in muslin, simmer them in the pan, and lift them out before potting.
- Judging "firm and smooth"The setting point is 220F/105C on a sugar thermometer, or a spoonful chilled on a cold saucer that wrinkles when pushed. The twenty-minute boil after the oven stage is a guide, not a rule.
- Potting and keepingThe recipe asks only for covered jars kept dry. Pot boiling hot into hot sterilised jars and seal at once; if you are not water-bath processing the filled jars, treat it as a refrigerator preserve and use it within a few weeks.
- Yield and costThe book's own note holds: expect roughly 4 lb of jam, which is four 1 lb jars or rather more if you use smaller ones. The 1s. 10d. is pre-decimal British currency, twenty-two old pence, and tells you only that apples and sugar were cheap staples.
Apple jam sits at the workaday end of Victorian preserving, and its presence in Cassell's reflects a domestic economy in which a glut of windfalls had to be turned into something that would keep through winter. Sugar had fallen steeply in price across the nineteenth century after the removal of the British sugar duties in 1874, which put large-batch home preserving within reach of ordinary households rather than only well-off ones. The four lemons do real work here: apples supply plenty of pectin but a mild jam of this kind benefits from the extra acid and the aromatic rind, since apple on its own tastes flat when sweetened this heavily. The oven-and-water-bath instruction is a relic of range cookery, and it is often suggested that the falling heat of a fire after the day's baking was free in a way that a pan watched on the hotplate was not.