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Apple Relish
7 lbs. apples. 2 lbs. Sultana raisins 1 pint (2 cups) vinegar 3½ lbs. sugar 3 lemons 2 tablespoonfuls orange flower water 1 teaspoonful powdered cloves 2 teaspoonfuls powdered cinnamon Clean the raisins and put them into an earthenware pan with the orange flower water, the strained lemon juice, sugar, vinegar, spices, and apples chopped.
Cook steadily for thirty minutes. Divide into jars and cover.
1 lb. dried peaches 1 lb. dried apricots 1 lb. dates 2 lbs. Sultana raisins ½ lb. currants 2 lbs. sugar
The text as printed is damaged: the title and the method call for apples, but no apple quantity appears in the ingredient list, and the six lines beginning "1 lb. dried peaches" belong to the recipe that follows on the page, not to this one. Read it as a sweet-sour fruit chutney and treat the fruit weight as your own decision.
- The missing applesNo apple quantity survives in this printing, so any figure would be invention. Judging by the 3½ lb of sugar and 2 lb of raisins, a batch of this scale wants something in the region of 3 to 4 lb of peeled, cored, chopped tart cooking apples; weigh to taste and expect to adjust the cooking time with it.
- Ignore the trailing listDried peaches, apricots, dates, currants and a second 2 lb of sugar do not fit this relish. They appear to be the ingredient list of another recipe that has run together with this one in the printing.
- SultanasSultana raisins are golden seedless raisins, sold simply as sultanas in Britain. Ordinary dark raisins work but give a muddier colour; the point of the sultana here is that it stays pale and plump against the apple.
- Orange flower waterStill sold, usually in the baking or Middle Eastern aisle. Brands vary a good deal in strength, and two tablespoons of a concentrated modern one may dominate everything; start with two teaspoons and add more off the heat.
- The earthenware panThe earthenware pan is specified because vinegar reacts with bare iron and aluminium. Use stainless steel or enamelled cast iron; the flavour can turn metallic in a reactive pan.
- Thirty minutes is a minimumThirty minutes of steady cooking will soften the fruit but leave the syrup loose. Cook until a spoon drawn through the bottom of the pan leaves a channel that fills slowly, stirring often once it thickens, since this much sugar scorches quickly.
- Jars"Divide into jars and cover" reflects a period faith in sugar and vinegar as the whole preservative. Pack hot into hot sterilised jars and either process in a boiling water bath according to current guidance or keep the sealed jars refrigerated and use within a few months.
- Yield and useYield depends entirely on how much apple you add, so judge it by the pan rather than a fixed figure. It is a condiment rather than a jam: it goes with cold pork, ham, curries and hard cheese, and it is generally said to improve after a month in the jar.
Recipes of this kind sit in the long English tradition of sweet spiced fruit pickles that grew out of imported Indian chutney, adapted to the apples and dried grapes an ordinary household actually had. The formula is the standard chutney chassis fruit, sugar, vinegar, warm spices, cooked down in one pan, and the orange flower water is the older, more genteel note in it, a survival from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English confectionery, where distilled flower waters did much of the work now done by vanilla extract.