Apple Jelly
Take half a peck of pippin apples, wash them clean, slice them from the core, put them in a preserving kettle with a quart of water. Boil till entirely soft, then strain through a flannel bag. To each pint of juice add one pound white sugar and the juice of three lemons. Boil till jellied. Do not stir while boiling.--Mrs. P.W.
Apple Jelly.
Pare and stew sour, juicy apples (Greenings are best),in enough water to cover them. Strain as for currant jelly. Allow a pound of sugar for each pound of juice. Put them together and strain. Boil four or five minutes, skimming thoroughly.--Mrs. M.B.B.
Apple Jelly.
Take any number of juicy apples, put them in a porcelain kettle, and boil to rags. Then strain them through a cloth or sieve. Put a pound of loaf sugar to each pint of the juice, and boil till it jellies. Flavor with the seed beaten in a mortar, and put in while the apples are cooking.--Mrs. G. W.
Three contributors' versions of the same jelly, differing mainly in how much of the apple they throw away. Read all three before starting: the first uses whole sliced apples and lemon juice, the second pares them, and the third crushes the pips for flavor.
- Half a peckA peck of apples runs about 10-12 lb, so half a peck is roughly 5 to 6 lb of fruit. With a quart of water that yields several pints of strained juice, and the recipe then adds a pound of sugar to every pint of it.
- Skip the crushed seedsMrs. G.W.'s "seed beaten in a mortar" is an old almond-scented flavoring, and apple pips contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when crushed. The quantity from a few apples is small and most is strained out, but there is no reason to court it. Leave the seeds whole or use a strip of lemon peel.
- Pippins and GreeningsBoth are firm, sharp cooking apples, high in acid and pectin, no longer common in supermarkets. Granny Smith, Bramley or any tart underripe apple works; a mix including crabapples sets most readily. Sweet dessert apples such as Gala are low in acid and pectin and may not set reliably without help.
- Do not pare or coreDo not pare -- Mrs. M.B.B.'s instruction to pare is the weakest of the three. Skins and cores are the richest source of pectin, so quarter the fruit unpeeled, as Mrs. G.W. does in boiling whole apples 'to rags,' and let the strainer do the separating. Mrs. P.W. keeps the skins but slices the fruit away from the core.
- Sugar by pint or by poundA pint of apple juice weighs close to a pound, so all three amount to roughly equal weights of juice and sugar. Loaf sugar was refined cane sold in cones; granulated sugar is the direct replacement.
- StrainingA flannel bag is a jelly bag. Let it drip unaided for several hours; squeezing forces pulp through and gives cloudy jelly. The instruction not to stir while boiling serves the same end, along with skimming the foam.
- When it is jellied"Boil four or five minutes" is far too short for most fruit; expect 10 to 25 minutes of hard boiling. Judge by a reading of 220F, or by the sheet test, when the syrup falls from a cold spoon in a curtain rather than in drops.
- Keeping itThese recipes end at the kettle because sealing was a separate operation: jars were covered with paper, brandied paper or wax and kept in a cool cellar. Refrigerate and use within a month, or process filled half-pint jars in a boiling-water bath by current canning directions for shelf storage.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, edited by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in the late 1870s, was built from recipes solicited from Virginia housewives, which is why three women's apple jellies sit stacked under one heading with their initials attached rather than being reconciled into a single method. Apples were among the fruits a Virginia household had in real quantity and could not eat fast enough: windfalls and seconds went to cider, apple butter, and jelly, all of which turned a perishable glut into something that kept through winter. The named varieties are a reminder of how local the orchard once was; 'pippin' covered a range of apples, and Rhode Island Greening was a northern keeping apple prized for cooking. Mrs. P.W.'s three lemons add acid, which helps a jelly set, and lemons had to be bought rather than grown in the garden.