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Preserved Apples
4 pounds apples 3 cups water 4 pounds sugar rind and juice of 6 lemons Wash, pare, and quarter apples; keep in water until ready to use. Cook sugar and water five minutes; add apples, cook until tender; add lemon juice and rind. Fill jars with apples, then with syrup, and seal.
The cooking here is sound apple work, but the preserving method is not. The recipe ends by filling jars and sealing with no heat processing at all, and that is the part that cannot be carried over.
- Open-kettle sealingLadling hot fruit into jars and sealing is what used to be called open-kettle canning, and it is no longer accepted for any shelf-stable product. The jar contents may be hot, but the headspace, the rim and the underside of the lid are not sterilised, and the seal that forms as the jar cools is unreliable rather than verified.
- No processing time or temperatureThere is no boiling-water bath, no stated minutes, no stated jar size. Without those, nothing about the finished jars can be predicted, and a preserve that looks and smells right can still be carrying mould or yeast growth under the lid.
- The syrup is not a preservative on its ownFour pounds of sugar to four pounds of apples plus lemon gives a high-acid, high-sugar product, which is the reason this method survived as long as it did. High acid limits botulism risk, but it does nothing against the surface moulds and osmophilic yeasts that spoil under-processed sweet preserves, and some of those moulds produce patulin and other mycotoxins in apple products.
- Jars and closures have changedThe recipe names no jar or closure, and a book of this date would most likely have assumed the glass-topped or zinc-capped jars with rubber rings then in use, sealed as the contents cooled. Modern two-piece lids are designed around a measured processing step and behave differently; the original instruction does not translate to them.
- If you want preserved applesUse a current tested recipe from a reliable preserving authority, with a stated jar size and processing time. This one is worth reading rather than following.
- Reading the quantitiesFour pounds of apples is roughly ten to twelve medium fruit before paring; the recipe says only 'rind and juice of 6 lemons', and the rind was probably intended in pared strips rather than grated, so it could be lifted out or distributed among the jars.
Lowney's, in common with many American cookbooks of its era, treated a preserve as a fruit held whole or in pieces in its own heavy syrup, distinct from jam (crushed), marmalade (citrus, sliced peel) and jelly (strained juice only). The proportion here — a pound of sugar for every pound of fruit — is often described as the usual preserving ratio of the nineteenth century, and is generally explained on the grounds that sugar at that concentration binds enough water to slow spoilage, and that the syrup keeps the apple quarters from collapsing. The six lemons are doing three jobs at once: acid for keeping, pectin from the rind and pith to firm the syrup, and flavour to cut the sweetness of a bland cooking apple. Open-kettle sealing was ordinary household practice well into the twentieth century, and the shift to measured boiling-water processing came out of extension-service and government canning work in the decades after this book, once the mechanics of a reliable vacuum seal were properly understood.