Home › The Apple › Jellied or Gelatine Apples
Jellied or Gelatine Apples
To two quarts of tart apples, peeled, cored, and quartered, allow one half box of gelatine and put it to soak in one half cup of water. Make a syrup of a pint each of water and sugar, adding lemon juice, peel or flavoring, and a dusting of ginger. Let sugar dissolve then boil five minutes. Drop in the syrup the apples, three or four at a time, and let cook till tender but not broken. Dip out with skimmer and place on a platter. When all are cooked and removed put the softened gelatine in the syrup until quite dissolved then remove and stir till it begins to set. Wet a mould and place in it half the jelly, then the apples in a layer and the rest of the jelly over them, setting away to chill and harden. Serve with cream.
A straightforward moulded apple jelly, but the two soft spots are the gelatine quantity and the temperature at which you assemble it.
- Half a box of gelatineBox sizes varied by maker, but a common granulated-gelatine box held about an ounce divided into four envelopes, which would make half a box roughly 1/2 oz, some 4 to 5 teaspoons. That should set the syrup firmly enough to unmould.
- Two quarts of applesMeasured by volume after peeling and quartering, which works out to roughly 2 1/2 to 3 lb of whole fruit, seven or eight medium apples. Use a firm tart variety such as Granny Smith or Braeburn; a soft dessert apple will collapse into the syrup.
- A pint each of water and sugarSugar was measured by volume in this period: a pint is 2 cups, about 14 oz. With 2 cups water that gives a light syrup, thin enough to poach in and to set as jelly rather than candy.
- Never boil the gelatineNever boil the gelatine hard -- soften it in the half cup of cold water first, then stir it into the syrup off the heat or over the barest warmth. Gelatine held at a rolling boil can lose strength, and a weak set may slump.
- Cook the apples in small batchesThree or four pieces at a time keeps the syrup at temperature and lets you lift each piece out the moment it turns translucent and yields to a skewer — usually 4 to 8 minutes depending on variety. Crowded fruit steams unevenly and breaks up.
- Let the jelly thicken before layering"Stir till it begins to set" means cooled to the consistency of raw egg white. Poured while thin, it lets the apple pieces float to the top and the mould turns out lopsided.
- Mould and unmouldingAllow a mould of at least 3 quarts for this quantity, rinsed with cold water and not dried. Chill at least 4 hours, preferably overnight; dip the outside briefly in hot water to release.
- YieldEight or more servings. 'Serve with cream' most likely means plain cream poured over, though the recipe does not specify.
Moulded fruit jellies like this one belong to the moment when gelatine stopped being a luxury of labour. Through most of the nineteenth century a cook wanting jelly boiled and clarified calf's foot or isinglass, a day's work; the packaged granulated gelatine sold by the box from about 1890 reduced that to soaking a spoonful in cold water, and jellied dishes moved rapidly down the social scale and into ordinary household cookbooks. Recipes of this kind — poach the fruit whole in syrup, suspend it in its own clarified liquid — also reflect how apples were then handled in bulk: a barrel in the cellar through winter, tart keeping varieties such as Greenings, Baldwins and Russets that hold their shape in syrup where a modern eating apple would not. The dusting of ginger with lemon peel is a conventional apple seasoning of the period, one of several the same books offer alongside vanilla or almond flavourings.