Home › The Principles of Cookery › Apple Juice for Jelly
Apple Juice for Jelly
Peel, core, and weigh four pounds of finely-flavoured cooking apples: put them into a stewpan with three pints of water, and let them simmer gently until they are broken. Strain the juice from them, and boil it again, with half a pound of sugar to each pint of juice. This juice is very nice to use in preserving other fruits. Time to boil with the sugar, five minutes. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for three or four pints.
This is not a jelly recipe but a preparation to keep on hand: a lightly sweetened apple juice used as a pectin-rich base for setting other, low-pectin fruits. Read it as a component, not a finished preserve.
- The hinge: don't discard the peels and coresMuch of an apple's pectin is concentrated in the skin and around the core, and the recipe throws both away. If you want maximum setting power, simmer the trimmings alongside the fruit in the same water and strain them out with the pulp.
- Choose the right apples"Finely-flavoured cooking apples" is usually taken to mean tart, firm fruit: Bramley, Granny Smith, crab apples. Fully ripe dessert apples tend to have less acid and less free pectin, and the juice will be weaker.
- Vessels and unitsA stewpan is a wide, straight-sided saucepan; use any non-reactive pan of 4-5 quart capacity. Three imperial pints is about 7 1/4 US cups of water. The "1s." is a shilling, the book's period costing, and means nothing today.
- "Until they are broken"Expect 30-45 minutes of gentle simmering, until the fruit collapses into a soft mush. Keep it at a bare simmer; a hard boil clouds the juice and breaks down pectin.
- Strain, don't squeezeHang the pulp in a jelly bag or several layers of muslin and let it drip. Pressing or twisting forces starch and fine solids through and gives a cloudy, dull juice.
- Sugar and the five minutesHalf a pound of sugar per imperial pint is roughly 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons per 2 1/2 cups of juice. Five minutes of boiling dissolves the sugar and heats the juice through, but will not bring the mixture to setting point — this is deliberate, since the juice is meant to be cooked again later with other fruit.
- Yield and keepingThree to four pints, as stated. Because it is under-boiled and only lightly sweetened it is not shelf-stable on its own: refrigerate for a week or two, freeze in measured cup portions, or process it by a current tested canning method.
- How to use itSubstitute a cup or so for part of the liquid when preserving strawberries, cherries, peaches, elderberries or rhubarb — fruits that are notoriously slack setters.
Before commercial pectin was sold in bottles and boxes, cooks made their own, and apples were the standard source: cheap, acidic and abundant in autumn, with enough pectin in skin and core to stiffen almost anything else in the fruit bowl. It is a technique the rest of the preserving chapter depends on, in the same way a stock recipe underpins the soups. Pectin was identified and named by French chemists in the early nineteenth century, from the Greek for "congealed", but the practical knowledge that apple and quince juice would set a preserve is far older than the chemistry, and crab-apple or apple jelly stock appears in English household books long before anyone could say why it worked. Commercially extracted apple pectin only reached domestic kitchens in the early twentieth century, though home-made jelly stock went on appearing in household books well after that.