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Fruits.-Apples
1 pound of sugar, 1 quart of water, 4 pounds of apples, Juice and rind of one lemon.
Take fine, ripe golden or hollow-cord pippins or bellflowers. Pare, core and throw them into cold water. When you have sufficient to fill two jars take from the water, weigh, put them in a porcelain-lined kettle, cover with boiling water, bring quickly to boiling point standing over a moderate fire, where they will scarcely bubble until tender enough to admit a straw. While cooking put the sugar in another kettle, stirring with a wooden spoon until the sugar dissolves; add the grated yellow rind and juice of a lemon, boil three minutes. With a perforated skimmer lift the apples from the water, hold them a moment to drain, and slide them carefully into the boiling syrup, continuing this until the bottom of the kettle is nicely covered. Cook the apples in this syrup until they have a clear appearance. Then lift them carefully and slide one at a time into a jar. Fill the jars to overflowing with the syrup, screw on the top and finish as directed.
Quinces may be added to the apples or apples and pineapples may be mixed. Apples and pine-apple are delicious.
This is a whole-fruit preserve finished by the open-kettle method, and it is missing the single most important number in it. The notes below explain what the text says and where it fails as a canning procedure.
- The sugar quantity is simply absentThe ingredient line gives 4 lb of apples and one lemon, then the method says "put the sugar in another kettle" with no weight and no water. A preserving syrup's sugar concentration is what keeps the fruit from fermenting in the jar; without it the recipe cannot be reproduced, and guessing at it is guessing at the preservation.
- Open-kettle canning is no longer acceptedSliding hot fruit into a jar, filling with syrup and screwing on the lid puts unsterilised air, jar rim and headspace inside a sealed container with no heat process afterward. The vacuum such a seal forms is unreliable, and mould and yeast spoilage in the resulting jars is common. Current practice processes filled jars in a boiling-water bath for a stated time.
- "Finish as directed" points somewhere elseThe phrase refers to instructions given elsewhere in the book, which are not on this page. Anyone following these words alone has no closing, processing or storage instruction at all.
- Apples are acidic, so this is a spoilage problem, not a botulism oneApples sit around pH 3.3 to 3.9 and will not support C. botulinum. The failure mode here is fermentation, mould and lost seals rather than toxin. That is a reason to discard bad jars rather than to fear them, but it is not a reason to use the method.
- The apple varietiesThe text's "golden or hollow-cord pippins" (evidently hollow-crown pippin) and "bellflowers" are nineteenth-century market apples that hold their shape through long syrup cooking. Firm, tart, non-mealy cooking apples are the modern equivalent; a Gala or Red Delicious will collapse.
- Porcelain-lined kettle and moderate firePorcelain-lined means an iron or steel kettle with an enamel lining, specified so the pale acid fruit does not react with or discolour against bare metal. "Moderate fire" here is defined by the text itself: hot enough that the water "will scarcely bubble" ot, so the apples do not burst.
- The straw testA clean straw or broom straw slid into the fruit was the standard doneness test; a wooden skewer does the same job. Note that the apples still have the syrup stage to go and will soften further.
- If you want this fruitUse a current tested recipe for whole or halved apples in syrup, with a stated sugar-to-water ratio and a boiling-water-bath processing time for your jar size and altitude.
Whole apples preserved in clear syrup were a display preserve rather than an everyday sauce: the point was fruit that came out of the jar intact, glassy and holding its shape, which is why the recipe insists on named firm varieties and on lifting each apple singly with a skimmer. The varieties invoked -- pippins and bellflowers -- were staples of American orchards and city markets in the second half of the nineteenth century and have largely dropped out of commercial growing since. The method is characteristic of the period's preserving manuals, which were written before home canning had been standardised around measured processing times; screw-top glass jars were by then in wide domestic use, and the assumption underlying such directions is that hot fruit plus a hot jar plus a tight lid was sufficient. That assumption is what later testing overturned. The closing suggestion of quince or pineapple reflects a preserving habit of pairing bland fruit with an aromatic or acid one.