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Apple Ginger
4 pounds sour apples 4 lemons 2 pounds sugar 1 ounce white ginger root Pare, core, and chop apples'; wash, remove seeds, and chop lemons; add sugar and ginger root, and cook very slowly six hours. Pour into glasses and cover. 4 pounds pears 1/2 pound Canton ginger
A high-sugar, high-acid apple conserve of the kind meant to sit in small glasses in a cool pantry. Two things need attention: the six-hour cook, and the sealing, which the original leaves entirely to the reader.
- The hinge: very slow means very slowWith 2 lb of sugar and chopped fruit, six hours over any real heat will scorch and turn the preserve bitter. Use the heaviest pan you own over the lowest burner, or a double boiler, and stir up from the bottom regularly. Cook until the apple has gone translucent and amber and a spoonful sheets rather than runs, which on a modern stove often happens well before six hours.
- Sour applesA firm high-acid cooking apple: Granny Smith, Bramley, Northern Spy, Rhode Island Greening. Sweet dessert apples give a flat, cloying result and less set, since the acid is doing part of the pectin work.
- White ginger rootThis is dried ginger rhizome, sold in the period bleached or scraped pale. Use about 1 oz of dried root, bruised and tied in muslin so it can be lifted out at the end, or substitute roughly 2 oz fresh ginger, sliced thin. Ground ginger is not a good swap here; it clouds the syrup.
- The lemonsChopped whole, peel and pith included, they behave like marmalade fruit and carry both pectin and bitterness. Slice or chop them very fine, remove all seeds, and expect a distinctly marmalade-like edge. Cutting back to two lemons gives a milder preserve at some cost to set.
- "Pour into glasses and cover"In the period that commonly meant jelly tumblers closed with paper, a tin cover, or melted paraffin. Use half-pint canning jars instead: fill hot, leaving 1/4 inch headspace, and either process in a boiling-water bath for 10 minutes or skip processing and keep the jars refrigerated and eat within a couple of months. Paraffin seals are no longer considered reliable.
- The trailing line"4 pounds pears + pound Canton ginger" is a variant printed as a fragment: substitute pears for the apples and use Canton ginger, meaning ginger preserved in heavy syrup, in place of the dried root. A fraction has dropped out of the quantity in the original text -- a quarter or a half pound -- and there is no way to tell which.
- YieldAround 5 to 6 cups finished preserve, so five or six half-pint jars depending on how far you reduce it.
Apple ginger belongs to a family of late-Victorian and Edwardian "ginger" preserves that used cheap orchard fruit as a carrier for expensive imported spice: apple, pear or marrow cooked down with sugar, lemon and ginger until it took on the amber translucence of the real thing. The reference to Canton ginger points at the trade behind it -- stem ginger candied in syrup and shipped from southern China, which seems to have been widely available to American grocers by the turn of the century, and preserves like this one are often said to have been understood as imitations of it. That it appears in Lowney's Cook Book, published by a Boston chocolate manufacturer, is a reminder of how these books worked: a candy firm's cookbook covered the whole household range, and a preserving chapter full of jellies and conserves was expected of any general American cookbook of the period, chocolate or not.