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Crab Apple Jelly
Slice the apples, take out the cores and seed, as they make the jelly bitter. Put them in a kettle cover with water, and boil till quite soft, keeping it well skimmed. Pour the pulp in a jelly bag, and let it drip through. To each pint of juice, add one pound and a half of sugar. Pour in the glasses while hot. Delicious with meats.--Mrs. P.W.
A high-pectin jelly with one crucial step left unwritten: the sugared juice must be boiled to setting point, which the original assumes the cook already knows.
- The missing boilAs written the recipe jumps from adding sugar to filling the glasses. The juice and sugar must be brought to a hard rolling boil and cooked until the mixture reaches 220F (8F above boiling at sea level), or sheets off a cold spoon in a single curtain. Crab apples are rich enough in pectin that this can happen quickly, so begin testing early rather than cooking to a set time.
- Sugar ratioA pound and a half of sugar per pint of juice is heavier than current practice, which runs closer to a pound per pint. The extra sugar gives a firmer, sweeter, paler jelly and a faster set; it is not dangerous, only old-fashioned.
- Weighing the juiceA pint here is 16 fluid ounces of strained juice, measured after dripping, not the volume of pulp. Measure it before you begin heating so the sugar is ready to go in at once.
- Don't squeeze the bagLet the jelly bag drip unaided, however slow. Pressing or wringing forces fine pulp through and gives cloudy jelly, which is the usual reason a batch looks muddy.
- Cores and seedsThe instruction to remove them is a matter of flavor, as stated. Many later recipes leave cores in for extra pectin, but crab apples have pectin to spare, so there is no loss in following Mrs. P.W.
- SkimmingSkim the foam both during the first boil and again just before filling the jars. Unskimmed scum sets as a cloudy gray layer at the top of each glass.
- Filling and sealing"Glasses" means straight-sided tumblers, which were covered with paper or, later in the period, sealed with a disc of melted paraffin. Use sterilized half-pint canning jars with two-piece lids instead and process 5 minutes in a boiling water bath, or refrigerate and use within a month.
- YieldAbout 3 lb of crab apples gives roughly a pint and a half of juice, which with this sugar ratio makes four to five half-pint jars.
- Serving"Delicious with meats" is accurate: the tartness suits ham, pork, roast fowl and game, and it holds its shape well enough to turn out of a small mold onto a plate.
Crab apples were a fixture of Southern yards and fencerows in the nineteenth century, valued less for eating than for exactly this purpose, since their acidity and heavy pectin load make jelly set without any added commercial pectin, which did not reach American kitchens until the 1910s. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by some 250 Virginia housekeepers, is full of these initialed and named attributions, so a reader could see whose kitchen a receipt came from. The note that it is "delicious with meats" places the jelly in the older tradition of tart fruit condiments served alongside roasts, the same role that filled a Virginia sideboard with damson preserves, quince, and spiced peaches rather than treating jelly strictly as something for bread.