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Crab Apple Preserves
Put the crab apples in a kettle, with some alum, keeping them scalding hot for an hour. Take them out, skin and extract the seed with a small knife, leaving on the stems. Put them in cold water awhile, then take them out, wipe them and put them in a syrup made of as many pounds sugar as you have of fruit. Let them stew gently till they look clear, then take them out and let the syrup boil longer. Siberian crabs may be preserved in the same way, except that they are not peeled and cored.
A straightforward 1:1 fruit-and-sugar preserve, with one nineteenth-century step — the alum bath — that modern preservers have abandoned. Everything else translates directly.
- The alumAlum (potassium aluminum sulfate) was added to firm fruit so it would hold its shape through long stewing. It is still sold as a pickling additive, but it leaves a metallic astringency and current preserving guidance drops it entirely. Omit it; crab apples are firm and high in pectin and will hold up on their own.
- Scalding, not boilingAn hour at scalding heat means water held just below a simmer, roughly 180-190F. Keep the pot off a hard boil so the fruit does not burst before it is peeled.
- "As many pounds sugar as you have of fruit"Equal weights. The recipe does not say whether the fruit is weighed before or after peeling and coring, though the weighing is described after. For syrup, add about a cup of water per pound of sugar and dissolve it fully before the fruit goes in, or the first fruit down will scorch.
- KettleA broad, heavy preserving pan, not a tea kettle. Use a wide non-reactive pot — stainless or enameled — since crab apples are acidic enough to pick up flavor from bare cast iron or copper.
- The hinge: cook gently"Stew gently till they look clear" is the whole technique. A rolling boil will burst the fruit into sauce; a bare simmer lets sugar penetrate until the flesh turns translucent. The recipe gives no time, so go by the look of the fruit. Reducing the syrup separately afterward, as directed, is what gives you whole fruit in thick syrup rather than jam.
- Syrup endpointBoil the drained syrup to about 220F, or until it sheets off a spoon, then pour it back over the fruit.
- StemsThe recipe leaves the stems on; they give something to lift the fruit by when moving it in and out of the syrup. Nothing is said about trimming them.
- Siberian crabsThe small red-fruited crabs (Malus baccata and its kin) are too little to peel and core sensibly, which is why the recipe exempts them. Prick each one once or twice with a needle so the skins do not split.
- StorageThe recipe gives no sealing step. Refrigerate the finished preserve, or follow a current tested water-bath process for whole fruit in syrup if you want it shelf-stable.
Crab apples grew widely in Virginia on seedling and naturalized trees in hedgerows and fence corners, and the fruit was too sour and tannic to eat out of hand but high in pectin and acid, which is exactly what a preserve wants. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, gathered contributions from Virginia housewives and reflects a kitchen economy in which sugar was bought and fruit was gathered; a pound of sugar to a pound of fruit was a common preserving proportion for turning a windfall into something that kept. The alum step is a reminder of how freely nineteenth-century cooks reached for the household chemical shelf: alum turns up in period books for pickles and for clarifying water as well as in the laundry, and its use as a fruit firmer persisted in American canning literature well into the twentieth century before being dropped.