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Crab Apple Jelly
Put the crab apples into preservingkettle. Pour in enough water to cover and boil until quite soft.
Put into cheese-cloth bag and strain over night. To every pint of juice add 1 pound of sugar. Boil juice 20 minutes and add the sugar. Stir well, and let boil up once, then remove from fire and put in glass jars.
A bare-bones jelly of the type that assumes the cook already knows what jelly looks like when it is done. Crab apples are naturally high in both pectin and acid, so the method works — but the finishing and sealing need modern handling.
- The hinge: judge the set, not the clock"Boil juice 20 minutes and add the sugar... let boil up once" is a rough guide, not a rule. Boil the sweetened juice until it reaches 220F (about 8F above boiling), or until a spoonful wrinkles on a cold plate. Depending on your fruit and pan width that can take anywhere from 2 to 15 minutes after the sugar dissolves.
- MeasuresA pint of juice is 2 cups; a pound of granulated sugar is about 2 1/4 cups. The ratio is roughly equal volumes of juice and sugar, which is standard for a high-pectin fruit.
- Preserving kettleA wide, heavy, non-reactive pan — stainless or enameled, never bare aluminum or copper for acid fruit. Width matters more than depth, since evaporation is what brings the jelly to setting point.
- Don't squeeze the bag"Strain over night" means hang the cheesecloth bag and let gravity do the work. Pressing or wringing forces pulp through and gives a cloudy jelly. Expect to lose some yield; that is the trade.
- Whole fruit, stems and allWhole fruit, uncored and unpeeled -- the recipe says nothing about preparation, and crab apples can go in whole; the cores and skins are where most of the pectin sits, though stems and blossom ends are usually pulled off first. Halve larger ones so they collapse evenly, and discard any that are bruised or wormy.
- SkimThe recipe doesn't mention it, but pink crab apple juice throws a heavy foam. Skim it off before jarring or the finished jelly will be flecked and dull.
- Sealing"Put in glass jars" leaves the seal unspecified; paraffin wax poured over the surface was common practice for jelly in this period. Paraffin seals are no longer recommended, as they crack and admit mold. Fill sterilized half-pint jars to 1/4 inch of the rim, apply two-piece lids, and process in a boiling-water bath.
- YieldRoughly 4 lb of crab apples gives about 4 cups of juice, which yields four to five half-pint jars.
Crab apples were one of the few fruits that reliably survived a Canadian prairie or Ontario farm winter, and varieties like the Transcendent and the Siberian crab were planted through the late nineteenth century as much for hardiness as for flavour. The fruit is too sour and astringent to eat out of hand, but that same acidity, combined with very high pectin content, makes it close to an ideal jelly fruit — it sets without commercial pectin, which was not sold in packets until the 1910s and 1920s. The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company as a promotional volume for its flour, and its preserving chapter reflects the household expectation that a year's worth of jams and jellies would be put up in late summer from whatever the orchard and hedgerow produced. Recipes of this vintage are written telegraphically because the technique was assumed knowledge; what the modern reader has to supply is the part the 1913 cook never needed spelled out.