Apple Manage
Stew and mash well three pounds pippins, then add three pounds sugar. Just before they are done, add a few drops lemon juice. Put in moulds and it will keep two years. Turned out and sliced, it is a nice dish for tea. Quinces are as nice as apples, prepared this way.--Mrs. B. J. B.
This is a fruit cheese — a paste of apples cooked down with an equal weight of sugar until it sets firm enough to unmould and slice. The recipe assumes you know when to stop cooking, which is the only thing that really matters here.
- The hinge: cook it far past jamThe mixture is done when a spoon drawn across the bottom of the pan leaves a clear track that fills in slowly, and the mass pulls away from the sides in a sheet. Undercooked, it will never slice; it will slump out of the mould as thick sauce. Expect an hour or more of steady stirring over low heat once the sugar is in, and use a wide heavy pan, since the paste spits as it thickens.
- "Pippins"A loose nineteenth-century term for firm, tart, late-keeping apples; in Virginia it most often meant the Newtown (Albemarle) Pippin. Any firm cooking apple works: Bramley, Granny Smith, Northern Spy. Three pounds is weight before peeling and coring, and should yield somewhere around 2 to 2 1/2 lb of pulp.
- Stew and mashCook the apples with a splash of water, covered, until collapsing, then push through a sieve or food mill rather than mashing. Skins and cores can go in the first cooking and be strained out — they carry the pectin that makes the paste set.
- Equal weight of sugarThree pounds of sugar to three pounds of fruit is a true 1:1 preserve. If you weigh the strained pulp instead of the raw fruit and match it, the result is sweeter and firmer. Some cooks now go to two-thirds sugar by pulp weight, which sets less hard but tastes more of apple.
- The lemon juiceA few drops at the end brighten the flavour, but lemon is also doing pectin work. If your apples are sweet or the paste seems slow to thicken, a tablespoon of juice added early does more good than a few drops added late.
- MouldsSmall shallow dishes, ramekins or a loaf tin lined with lightly oiled parchment. Pour the paste in hot, smooth the top, and let it stand uncovered in a dry place for a day or two to form a skin before wrapping.
- "It will keep two years"Untrue in a modern kitchen. That claim assumes a cold, dry larder and a paste dried until quite stiff. Wrap in parchment and keep it refrigerated, where it holds for several months; discard at any sign of mould, since the surface is where it fails.
- QuincesThey need peeling, longer stewing with more water, and they will not collapse the way apples do. Allow well over an hour for them to go properly soft; the rosy colour comes only with prolonged slow cooking. The resulting paste is firmer and closer to Spanish membrillo.
- Serving and yieldThe three pounds of sugar remain in the pan whatever boils off, so the finished paste will weigh at least that; reckon on roughly 3 1/2 to 4 lb. Sliced thin with tea and buttered bread as intended, or with a sharp cheese, which is where fruit cheeses now most often turn up.
Fruit cheeses of this kind — fruit pulp boiled with its own weight of sugar until it will hold a cut edge — are among the oldest sweet preserves in the English kitchen, descended from the medieval quince pastes called chardequince and cotignac and cousin to Spanish membrillo and Portuguese marmelada. The odd title "Apple Manage" may be a phonetic spelling picked up from dictation or an old family manuscript rather than a distinct dish, though what word lies behind it cannot be recovered; garbled headings are not unusual in contributed recipes. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), edited by Marion Cabell Tyree, drew on contributions from some 250 Virginia housewives, most recipes carrying a name or initials, and it preserves their spelling and their assumptions alike — including the confidence that a well-boiled sugar paste in a cool larder would outlast two summers. The Newtown, or Albemarle, Pippin was a prized Virginia keeping and export variety and is the likeliest apple meant here, which would explain a recipe built around fruit still sound in late winter.