Apple Jam
Pare, core, and weigh tart apples, allowing for four pounds of apples four pounds of brown sugar. Chop apples, meantime making a syrup of the sugar with as little water as can be used; add apples, the grated peel of four lemons, and a little ginger root. Simmer till the fruit pulp is translucent and golden in colour, when place in small jars. Loaf sugar may be used, the lemon and ginger omitted, and the pulp cooked longer.
A plain equal-weights preserve: four pounds of prepared apple to four pounds of sugar, cooked down until the pulp turns translucent. The weighing happens after paring and coring, which is the detail most likely to be skimmed.
- Weigh after peeling"Pare, core, and weigh" means the sugar is matched to the trimmed fruit, not the whole apples. Expect to buy roughly 5 to 5 1/2 lb of whole apples to end up with 4 lb of prepared flesh.
- Which apples"Tart" here is doing real work: the acid sets the jam and keeps a 1:1 sugar syrup from tasting flat. Bramley, Granny Smith or any hard cooking apple; sweet dessert apples such as Gala give a cloying, loose result.
- Brown sugar vs. loafLoaf sugar was refined white sugar sold in a cone and broken up as needed — use granulated. The brown-sugar version is darker and more caramel-flavoured. The recipe simply directs that with loaf sugar the lemon and ginger are omitted and the pulp cooked longer; it gives no reason for the change.
- "As little water as can be used"Add only enough water to start the sugar dissolving over low heat; a single cup will not take up 4 lb of sugar by itself, so add sparingly and let the heat and the apples' juice do the rest. Do not let it boil before the sugar has gone clear, or you will get crystals in the finished jar.
- The ginger is undefined"A little ginger root" is genuinely ambiguous. A 2-inch piece of fresh root, bruised and tied in muslin so it can be lifted out, is a reasonable reading; ground ginger will cloud the jam.
- Lemon peel onlyGrated peel of four lemons is a lot of zest and no juice. Take only the yellow, not the white pith, which turns bitter over a long simmer.
- Judging "translucent and golden"Expect a fair stretch of open simmering, perhaps 40 to 60 minutes. Translucency and colour are the recipe's own test; the book gives no temperature, though a modern cook would look for a reading near 220F. Stir often once it thickens — equal-weight sugar scorches on the base very readily.
- Filling and keepingYield is roughly 4 to 5 pints. "Place in small jars" in a book of this period would likely have assumed a paper or wax seal and a cool larder; for shelf storage follow current water-bath canning directions for fruit jam, or simply refrigerate and use within a few weeks.
Apple jam of this kind belongs to the long tradition of stretching a cheap, keepable fruit with expensive sugar — and by the late nineteenth century sugar had become cheap enough that a household could reasonably put up pound for pound. Apples are unusually rich in pectin, which is why the recipe needs no added setting agent and why apple juice was long used to help set less cooperative fruits; the same chemistry is behind commercial pectin, which was first extracted from apple pomace. The two versions offered here mark a real distinction of period taste: brown sugar with lemon peel and ginger root gives a spiced, dark preserve in the older style of apple butters and marmalades, while the refined-sugar version cooked longer is the plainer, paler jam. Ginger and lemon peel together were a standard pairing for bland fruit, appearing in marrow and rhubarb preserves for the same reason.</p>