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Apricot Jam, Green
Take two pounds of young apricots: place them in a jar, and pour a little boiling water over them. Let them remain in this for one minute; remove them and rub off the down. Place them in a preserving-pan with a cupful of thick syrup, and let them simmer very gently until the fruit is quite tender. Take them out and put them on an inverted sieve to drain. Make a syrup of two pounds of sugar and two cupfuls of water. Put the apricots into this, and boil for twenty minutes; then put them into jars, and cover the fruit in each jar with a piece of paper dipped in oil, and cover the jars with thin paper brushed with white of an egg or a little gum-water. Probable cost, 2s.
This is a whole-fruit preserve rather than a crushed jam, and it depends on hard, unripe apricots that hold their shape through two separate boilings. Read the sealing note before you start, because that is the part that has not aged well.
- "Green" apricotsThese are immature fruit, picked while the flesh is firm and still tart and the stone soft or barely formed. Ripe supermarket apricots will collapse into a puree under this treatment; look for hard, underripe fruit at a farmers' market in early summer, or use the thinnings from a tree.
- The downThe one-minute scald is only there to loosen the fuzz, which otherwise gives the finished preserve an unpleasant texture. Rub the fruit with a coarse cloth while still warm rather than trying to peel it.
- "A cupful of thick syrup"Genuinely ambiguous — the book never defines it, presumably taking a preserving syrup already to hand for granted. A heavy syrup of roughly equal weights sugar and water, boiled until it coats a spoon, is one reasonable reading, but the quantity is small and its job is to firm and sweeten the fruit gradually rather than to set anything.
- Two boilings, on purposeThe gentle first simmer draws water out of the fruit slowly so it does not burst; the drain on the inverted sieve lets it firm up before it meets the strong syrup. Skipping straight to the second syrup will give you shreds.
- The twenty minutesTime it from a genuine boil and watch the syrup rather than the clock. Two pounds of sugar to two cups of water is a very concentrated syrup, heavier than a standard heavy syrup, and it will reach the thread stage quickly in a wide pan; pull it off before it darkens.
- The paper seal is obsoleteOiled paper laid on the surface with an egg-white or gum-arabic outer cover was the Victorian answer to airtight storage, and it relied on cold larders and frequent inspection for mould. Use sterilised jars with proper two-piece lids, and treat the result as a refrigerator preserve unless you water-bath process it to a current tested method.
- Yield and useYield depends on how much of the syrup is jarred with the fruit; expect several half-pint jars from two pounds of apricots. It suits serving as a compote-style sweetmeat with cream, or alongside cheese, as much as spreading on bread.
- "Probable cost, 2s."Two shillings, the household-budget figure Cassell's attaches to nearly every entry. It is a comparative marker for a Victorian cook, not a price to convert.
Preserving fruit before it ripens is an old European economy: green apricots, green walnuts, green gooseberries and unripe plums all take sugar well because their firm flesh and high acidity survive long boiling. Cassell's, a dictionary aimed at middle-class households running their own store cupboards, belongs to a world where a tree's early thinnings were something to be used rather than discarded. The sealing method — a skin of paper glazed with egg white or gum-water — was standard well into the late nineteenth century and predates the general adoption of the screw-top and rubber-ringed jar in domestic kitchens. It worked tolerably in a cool, dry larder, and period advice sometimes recommended that any mould forming on the top be scraped off and the jar re-covered, a practice no modern food-safety guidance would endorse.