Home › The Apple › Sweet Apple Pickle
Sweet Apple Pickle
Add a teaspoon each of cinnamon, cloves and allspice (in thin cloth bag) to a syrup made with a quart of vinegar and three pounds of sugar. Have ready four pounds of apples pared, cored, and halved. Place carefully in the syrup, simmer till tender, and place in heated jars. Cook down the syrup till thick, when pour over fruit, filling up well, and seal.
APPLE JELLY No. I Take sour fruit, Do not core or pare, merely wash, wipe, and cut out blemishes. Cut up, pour over sufficient water to cover, and simmer till very soft, when drain through flannel bag, letting drip over night. To each quart of syrup the juice of a lemon or other tart fruit may be allowed as further flavouring if liked. Cook down the juice, skimming well before adding sugar (heated), a pound for each pint of juice. Simmer till sugar has dissolved; then boil, and the jelly will form in about twenty minutes. Rose geranium, mint, or other leaves may be used as flavouring, or orange blossoms preserved.
APPLE JELLY No. 2 (With Quince) See Quince Jelly No. 3
Two preserves run together on one page: a spiced sweet apple pickle in vinegar syrup, and a straightforward long-boil apple jelly that relies on the fruit's own pectin. Both are workable, but the sealing method is a century out of date.
- Sealing"Place in heated jars... and seal" is open-kettle canning, which was standard until the mid-twentieth century. Both of these are high-acid products, so the fix is simply to process the filled jars in a boiling-water bath — 10 minutes for half-pints and pints of jelly, 15 for the pickle — rather than trusting the heat of the syrup to sterilise the jar.
- Vinegar strengthA quart of vinegar to three pounds of sugar gives a very sweet, mild pickling syrup. Use cider vinegar at 5 percent acidity; older household vinegar was variable, and anything weaker than 5 percent should not be used for a preserve meant to keep.
- Choosing the applesFor the pickle, use a firm variety that holds its shape — Granny Smith, Braeburn, Northern Spy. The recipe does not say whether the four pounds is weighed before or after preparation; if it means prepared fruit, allow about five pounds as bought. "Simmer till tender" means a knife slides in with slight resistance, roughly 10 to 15 minutes; past that the halves collapse into the syrup.
- The spice bagWhole spices in cloth, not ground, or the syrup turns muddy and gritty. Substitute a stick of cinnamon, a teaspoon of whole cloves and a teaspoon of whole allspice berries, and pull the bag before the final reduction so the flavour does not turn bitter.
- Sour fruit for jelly"Sour fruit" means underripe or naturally tart apples, and the instruction not to pare or core is deliberate: skins and cores carry most of the pectin. Crab apples work best of all. Fully ripe dessert apples will not set reliably without added pectin.
- Dripping the bagA flannel jelly bag can be replaced with a double layer of damp cheesecloth in a colander. Do not squeeze it overnight-dripping is slow because pressure forces starch and pulp through and clouds the jelly.
- A pound of sugar to a pintThat is about two cups of sugar per two cups of juice — a full-sugar jelly, which is what makes the set and the keeping quality work. Warming the sugar first, as directed, keeps the boil from stalling.
- Judging the set"About twenty minutes" is a guide, not a rule. Go by a thermometer at 220F at sea level, or by the sheet test: two drops running together off a cold spoon and falling as one curtain.
- YieldNeither recipe gives a yield. The pickle will fill several pints, depending on how far the syrup is reduced; the jelly depends entirely on how much juice the apples give up.
Sweet spiced fruit pickles of this kind — vinegar, a great deal of sugar, and cinnamon, cloves and allspice in a bag — were a fixture of American and British preserving from the mid-nineteenth century onward, and were commonly served alongside cold meats and roasts. Households with more apples than they could store turned windfalls and second-quality fruit into pickle, jelly, butter and sauce, and the same page in a fruit manual would run them one after another, as here. The jelly recipe reflects the pre-commercial-pectin era, when setting power came from choosing sour, underripe fruit and boiling skins and cores along with the flesh; bottled pectin reached American kitchens only in the early 1910s, and books of this generation instead taught cooks to read the fruit. The suggested flavourings — rose geranium leaves, mint, orange blossom — point to a taste for scented preserves that has largely disappeared, though rose geranium apple jelly survives in Southern American cookery.