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Cider Apple Sauce
Pare, core, and wash apples (two-thirds sweet, onethird sour), and place in preserving kettle with one quart of cider for each pailful of apples. Simmer slowly till of a deep colour. Quinces may be added to the sauce to give flavour; a dozen or less as taste indicates. Put away in stone jars.
This is essentially a lightly spiced-free apple butter: apples cooked down in sweet cider until they darken. The original is written in orchard quantities, so the first job is scaling and the second is preventing scorch.
- A pailful, and how to scale itA household pail of the period is usually reckoned at 10–12 quarts, which would hold something in the region of 15–20 lb of pared apples; the book gives no figure. The ratio that matters is 1 quart of cider to that quantity, so at home use about 4 lb of prepared apples to roughly three-quarters of a cup of cider.
- "Cider" means sweet ciderFresh unfermented apple cider, pressed and unsweetened — not hard cider and certainly not cider vinegar. Unfiltered cloudy cider gives the fullest flavour; filtered apple juice will work but tastes thinner.
- Two-thirds sweet, one-third sourSweet apples (Golden Delicious, Fuji, Gala, or heirloom sweets like Tolman Sweet) supply sugar so none needs adding; the sour third (Bramley, Granny Smith, Baldwin) supplies acid and pectin so the sauce is not flat. Keep the proportion — an all-sweet batch tastes cloying.
- The hinge: low heat and constant attention"Simmer slowly till of a deep colour" means several hours, typically 3 to 5, until the sauce is mahogany and mounds on a spoon. Use the heaviest pot you own, stir down to the bottom every ten minutes once it thickens, and drop the heat as it goes — sugar concentrates and burns easily at the end. A 300F oven with the lid off, stirred hourly, is a lower-risk route than the stovetop.
- QuincesThe recipe allows "a dozen or less as taste indicates"; a dozen to a pailful of apples is a strong flavouring. They are rock-hard raw and must be peeled, cored and chopped small so they break down with the apples; they also add pectin, so the sauce will set firmer.
- Stone jarsThe glazed stoneware crock of the original was cellar storage, and the sauce kept because it was cooked down hard and acidic. Treat it as a fresh preserve: refrigerate for two or three weeks, or freeze. For shelf storage, follow a current water-bath canning procedure for apple butter with tested jar sizes and processing times.
- YieldA 4 lb batch reduces to roughly 3 to 4 cups of finished sauce, depending on how dark you take it.
Cider apple sauce belongs to the autumn cider-press economy of the American Northeast and Pennsylvania, where a farm might press more sweet cider in a week than it could drink, and cooking apples down in their own juice turned two perishable gluts into one keeping preserve. The technique is the same one that produces apple butter — long reduction until the fruit sugars caramelise and the colour deepens — and it needs no added sugar at all, which is why sweet apples make up two-thirds of the mix. Quince, once a standard dooryard tree and almost never eaten raw, appears here as the aromatic; its perfume and heavy pectin content did the work that cinnamon and cloves do in other recipes. The instruction to "put away in stone jars" places the book firmly in the era of the crock and the cool cellar, before home canning in glass with measured processing times became ordinary household practice.