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Preserving and Canning Fruit and Vegetables: Strain
For plum jelly use an underripe acid plum. Wash, stem and cook gently in 1 quart of water for each peck of fruit. Strain the juice and proceed as for currant jelly.
Apple and Crab-apple Jelly.i urge fruits such as apples, peaches and pears must be boiled in water to extract the pectin and flavoring matter they contain. As a rule 4 quarts of water added to 8 quarts of fruit will produce 3 quarts of strained juice, but juicy peaches and plums may require only 3 or 3 quarts of water. Boil down the juice if necessary to 3 quarts. Stem and wash the fruit. Wipe dry and clean carefully the blossom end, and cut in quarters. Add 4 quarts of water to 8 of fruit and cook gently until soft and clear. Strain the juice, boil down to 3 quarts if necessary and proceed as for currant jelly.
The quality of the jelly will depend upon the natural flavor of the fruit.
Hence choose preferably a fine flavored acid apple and make the jelly at any time of the year when the fruit chosen is at its prime. Apple jelly made in the spring may be improved by the addition of the juice of a lemon to every pint of apple juice.
To make cider apple jelly, use cider fresh from the press instead of water.
A jelly method written for cooks who already knew the currant-jelly routine and only needed the fruit-specific adjustments. Two things have to be supplied from outside the text: the sugar, and the sealing.
- The missing half of the recipe"Proceed as for currant jelly" means measure the strained juice, boil it hard, add roughly a pound of sugar per pint of juice (some cooks used three-quarters), and cook to the jell point. That is 220F at sea level, or 8F above whatever your water boils at.
- A peckA peck is 8 dry quarts; a peck of apples runs about 10 to 12 lb, a peck of plums somewhat more. The recipe's later ratios are given in quarts of cut fruit rather than weight, which is loose by modern standards; work by the pot rather than the scale.
- Garbled lines"i urge fruits" is a printer's corruption of "Large fruits." The water quantity printed as "3 or 3 quarts" is likely "2 or 3 quarts." Neither affects the method.
- Underripe is not a suggestionPectin and acid are both highest just before full ripeness and fall off fast afterward. Dead-ripe plums or mealy storage apples will give a syrup that never sets, which is why the spring apples are propped up with lemon juice.
- Strain, do not squeezeHang the cooked fruit in a jelly bag or several layers of damp cheesecloth and let it drip, ideally for several hours. Pressing or wringing the bag forces pulp through and gives cloudy jelly.
- The blossom endCleaning the blossom end carefully is likely aimed at mold and grit lodged in the calyx rather than at appearance. Cores, skins and seeds all stay in, and much of the apple's pectin is in them.
- Cider jellyHere the cider replaces the water the fruit is cooked in, rather than being boiled down by itself; either way sweet cider from the press gives the dark amber New England style. Use unpasteurized or pasteurized sweet cider, but not hard cider and not filtered clear apple juice, which has little pectin left.
- SealingDo not seal with a paraffin cap as period books directed; wax seals fail and admit mold. Fill sterilized half-pint jars, leaving a quarter inch of headspace, and process in a boiling-water bath according to a current tested guide.
- YieldThree quarts of strained juice with sugar will give roughly 10 to 12 half-pint jars.
Household books of this period treated jelly as chemistry that had to be managed by feel; the cook got her setting power by choosing acid, underripe, high-pectin fruit and by boiling apple cores and skins along with the flesh. That is why the entry reads as a set of ratios rather than a recipe, and why the author bothers to say that spring apples need a lemon per pint: stored fruit has lost both the acid and the pectin that make the gel. Crab apples were valued for exactly this reason, being too sour and astringent to eat but reliable setters, and the same logic put underripe plums and green grapes into the jelly kettle. Cider jelly is a New England farmhouse product generally traced to the cider mills, where the press run was abundant and cheap in autumn.