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Preserved Crab Apples
4 pounds crab apples 4 cups water 4 pounds sugar juice of 4 lemons Wash crab apples, and cook in sugar and water syrup until tender; add lemon juice, fill jars with fruit, then with syrup, and seal.
The fruit is much more attractive if the skin is left on, but may be removed if preferred.
A straightforward heavy-syrup fruit preserve, equal weights of fruit and sugar, relying on crab apples' own acidity and pectin. The one part that has genuinely been overturned is the sealing method.
- Open-kettle sealing is obsolete"Fill jars with fruit, then with syrup, and seal" is open-kettle canning, standard in 1907 and no longer considered reliable: the headspace is not sterilised and the seal is not vacuum-tested. Follow current tested boiling-water-canner guidance for fruit in syrup, or simply refrigerate the finished jars and eat them within a few weeks.
- Stems and blossom endsThe recipe says only to wash. Leave the stems on if you want the classic look, but pick out the dry blossom ends, and prick each apple once or twice with a needle so the skins do not burst and the syrup penetrates.
- Keeping the fruit wholeCrab apples collapse quickly once soft. Bring the syrup to a boil first, then lower the fruit in and keep it at a bare simmer; a rolling boil will shake the skins off. "Tender" here means a skewer slides in with slight resistance, usually 10-20 minutes depending on variety and size.
- Why the lemon goes in lastThe recipe adds the juice only at the end and does not say why; late addition would at least keep the fresh aroma from being boiled off. Crab apples are already tart; the lemon is for brightness and may help the syrup set slightly, not for safety.
- Syrup consistencyThis is a 1:1 sugar-to-fruit preserve, which produces a thick, almost jelly-ish syrup as the apples' pectin comes out. If the syrup seems thin after the fruit is lifted out, boil it down alone for a few minutes before filling the jars.
- YieldFour pounds of fruit plus the syrup fills several pint jars, the exact number depending on the size of the apples and how tightly they pack; expect syrup left over.
- Sourcing the fruitOrnamental crabs bred for blossom can be tiny, dry and bitter. Look for the larger culinary sorts -- Hyslop, Transcendent, Dolgo or similar -- of the kind grown for cooking rather than for show.
Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer; the chocolate chapters were the point of the book, but it also carried a full general household repertoire, preserving included. Crab apples earned their place in that repertoire by being useless raw and excellent cooked: too small, hard and sour to eat out of hand, but loaded with pectin and acid, which is exactly what a cook without commercial pectin needed. Whole spiced or plain crab apples in heavy syrup were a standard American autumn put-up, served alongside roast meats as a sharp garnish in the same way pickled peaches were, and the note about leaving the skins on is practical vanity -- with a red-skinned variety the skins bleed into the syrup and turn the whole jar rose-coloured, though the recipe does not specify one.