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Apples Preserved in Grape Juice
For apples or crab apples see Grape Juice for preserving. APPLES AND CRAB APPLES PRESERVED IN CIDER To each quart of boiled cider add three-fourths pint of sugar (or less as taste indicates). Use this as the preserving syrup, proceeding as with preserved apples.
Two linked notes rather than a full method: the syrup is the recipe, and the fruit is handled as in the book's basic preserved apples. Everything hinges on knowing what "boiled cider" is.
- Boiled cider is not hard ciderIn American usage of this period "cider" generally means fresh, unfermented apple juice, and boiled cider is that juice reduced by simmering until it is dark and syrupy; accounts vary on how far, commonly anywhere from a quarter down to a seventh of the original volume. Fermented cider boiled down gives something thinner and more sour.
- The measurementsA quart is 4 cups. Three-fourths of a pint of sugar is 1 1/2 cups by volume, roughly 10 oz by weight — the sugar here is measured, as was common, by volume rather than weight.
- Sweetness is already built inReduced cider is sweet on its own, and the author allows "or less as taste indicates." Taste the reduction before adding the full 1 1/2 cups.
- Apples versus crab applesCrab apples are preserved whole, stems left on, and want pricking with a needle in several places so the skins do not burst. Larger apples are pared, cored and quartered; a firm variety that holds shape — Northern Spy, Granny Smith, Winesap — behaves far better than a soft eating apple.
- "Proceeding as with preserved apples"The book's own preserved-apple method is not reproduced here; the usual approach is to bring the syrup to a boil, add the fruit and simmer gently until it is clear and translucent rather than collapsing, since hard boiling breaks the quarters into sauce.
- The original gives no sealing instructionsThere is no processing time, no jar treatment and no mention of headspace. For anything intended for shelf storage, follow a current water-bath canning schedule for apple preserves; otherwise treat this as a refrigerator preserve and use it within a few weeks.
Boiled cider was one of the standard sweeteners of the northeastern American farm kitchen well into the twentieth century, made in quantity at cider-making time by reducing fresh juice in an open kettle until it kept on its own. It went into pies, apple butter, cider molasses and preserves like this one, and it survived as a commercial product in New England. The recipe's economy is the point: apples preserved in the concentrated juice of other apples, with only enough purchased sugar added to hold the syrup, and the note that grape juice may be substituted reflects the same habit of using whatever the season had already produced in surplus.