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Blackberry and Apple Jam
Take equal quantities of freshly gathered dry blackberries and green English apples. Take the stalks off the blackberries, and peel, core, and slice the apples. Allow three-quarters of a pound of loaf sugar to each pound of fruit. Place the sugar in a clean preserving-pan with a cupful of water, put over the fire, and when the sugar has dissolved add the fruit. Stir constantly until it boils, skim carefully, and let it boil for fully three quarters of an hour. Pour into jars, cover, and store in a dry, airy place. A little lemon juice may be added if desired.
A hedgerow jam that leans on the apple for pectin and the long boil for set. The proportions are sound; the timing and the potting instructions are where Victorian practice and modern practice part company.
- Boil to a set, not to a clockThree-quarters of an hour is far longer than this mixture needs and will give you something dark and caramelised. Start testing at about 20 minutes: 220F/105C on a sugar thermometer, or a spoonful chilled on a cold saucer that wrinkles when pushed.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined cane sugar sold in a cone and broken up as needed. Ordinary granulated white sugar is the direct equivalent; there is no need for jam sugar here, since the apples supply the pectin.
- Green English applesThis means a firm, sharp cooking apple picked before full ripeness, when its pectin and acid are highest. Bramley is the obvious British choice; Granny Smith works elsewhere. Dessert apples will give a slack, sweet jam.
- "Freshly gathered dry"Blackberries picked in dry weather, not washed. Wet fruit adds water you then have to boil off, and very ripe berries have less pectin than firm ones. If you must rinse them, spread them out and let them dry.
- The lemon juice is not optional in practiceThe lemon juice -- Acid helps pectin set, and a little added acid can improve both set and colour. If your blackberries are very ripe or the apples mild, the juice of a lemon is worth adding; with a sharp cooking apple the recipe's "if desired" is fair.
- Preserving-panA wide, heavy, unlined copper or stainless pan — wide so evaporation is fast and the pan no more than half full when boiling. A tall stockpot will foam up and scorch. Aluminium and untinned iron react with the fruit acid.
- SeedsBlackberry pips are conspicuous in a jam of equal parts. Some cooks push half the berries through a sieve first and add the pulp, keeping the rest whole for texture.
- Potting and storage"Cover and store in a dry, airy place" assumed a cold larder and a waxed disc. Fill sterilised jars to within a quarter inch of the rim while the jam is near boiling, seal at once, and either water-bath process the jars or keep them refrigerated and use within a few weeks.
- Yield2 lb of prepared fruit with 1 1/2 lb of sugar gives roughly 3 lb of jam, about five half-pint jars.
Blackberry and apple is the classic English hedgerow pairing, and the reason is chemical rather than sentimental: brambles fruit abundantly and free in late summer but set poorly on their own, while windfall or unripe cooking apples are rich in the pectin and acid the berries lack. The recipe sits among preserving instructions of a period when jam-making had shifted from a gentry stillroom art to a routine domestic economy — cheaper refined sugar, more widely available in Britain after the sugar duties were removed in the 1870s, made it possible for ordinary households to put up large quantities of fruit that would otherwise have been wasted. The specification of "green English apples" is a working cook's shorthand for high-acid, high-pectin fruit, knowledge held long before pectin was isolated and named in the nineteenth century.