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Apple Preserves
Pare and core eight pounds tart apples. Make a syrup of eight pounds of sugar to one quart of soft water and dissolve one teaspoon citric acid crystals in this. Heat carefully and when clear and thick place in the syrup the apples, turning often that the syrup may cover them, letting remain till fruit is translucent. Place them on a hotter part of the fire till at boiling point, when remove the fruit (whole) and place carefully in heated jars. Fill up with the syrup, place a round of cotton soaked in brandy on top of each, seal covers, and put in cool place.
For simple canning much less sugar may be used and pineapples may be added in one third or equal proportion, or barberries.
A whole-fruit preserve at the old equal-weights ratio: eight pounds of apples to eight pounds of sugar. The point is to hold the apples intact while the syrup slowly penetrates them, so almost everything depends on patience over heat.
- The hinge: low and slow, then one short boilThe apples sit in hot syrup off the fierce heat until they turn translucent; the recipe gives no timing, so the fruit itself is the gauge. Only at the very end are they brought to a boil. Rushing the first stage bursts the fruit and you get sauce in syrup instead of whole preserved apples.
- "Soft water"Water low in calcium and magnesium. Hard water can firm up pectin and slow the syrup's penetration; distilled or filtered water is the modern equivalent. One quart is four cups.
- Citric acid crystalsStill sold, in the canning aisle or as sour salt. A teaspoon is in the region of a quarter-cup of lemon juice in acidity, the usual modern substitution. It keeps the syrup from crystallising and brightens flat, low-acid apples.
- Choice of appleYou need a variety that holds its shape: Granny Smith, Northern Spy, Braeburn, Winesap. Anything that collapses into sauce when baked will collapse here. Cut in halves or thick rings if whole cored apples are too large for your jars.
- "A hotter part of the fire"A range-top instruction from the wood-stove era, where a pan was simply slid toward the firebox. On a modern burner, move from the lowest possible setting up to medium so the syrup reaches a full boil for a minute or two before you lift the fruit out.
- The brandy cloth and sealingA round of spirit-soaked cotton laid on the surface was a common nineteenth-century mould barrier. Whatever the recipe means by "seal covers," it is not a seal by current standards. If you want shelf-stable jars, follow a present-day tested water-bath process for apple preserves; otherwise treat these as refrigerator preserves and eat them within a few weeks.
- The low-sugar variationThe closing line offers "much less sugar" for plain canning. Sugar here is doing preservative work as well as sweetening, and reducing it changes the keeping qualities entirely. Cut the sugar only if you are following a current tested canning recipe with its own processing times.
- Barberries and pineappleBarberries are the tart red fruit of Berberis, once common in American kitchen gardens and now mostly sold dried in Persian groceries; they add acid and colour. Fresh pineapple contains bromelain, but the long hot syrup stage destroys it, so it will not spoil the set.
- YieldNot given in the recipe; the quantities are large, and the final count of jars will depend on how much syrup clings to the fruit.
Whole-fruit preserves like this one sit halfway between jam and candied fruit: the fruit is never mashed, and the slow soak in heavy syrup is a domestic version of the confectioner's technique for glacé fruit. Equal weights of sugar and fruit was the standard nineteenth-century rule, and at that concentration the syrup itself does much of the preserving; the brandy-soaked cotton round, a fixture of American and English receipt books through the 1800s, was there to discourage surface mould rather than to make an airtight seal. The call for "soft water" and for citric acid crystals rather than lemon juice suggests a turn-of-the-century book, from a time when packaged acid crystals had become cheap and reliable and household guides were starting to talk about water hardness. Apples, cheap and available all winter in barrels, were among the fruits given this treatment in books like this one, with barberries or pineapple added for the tartness and perfume that a keeping apple lacks.