Home › Fruit Desserts › Apple Jelly No. 1
Apple Jelly No. 1
7 pounds of apples 2 ounces blanched almonds 2 ounces root ginger 1 teaspoon ground ginger 3 pints water Boil the apples in the water for an hour and a half; then strain through a sieve. Add to each pint of liquor three-quarters of a pound of sugar, and boil the liquor twenty minutes. Then add the sugar and ginger, and boil twenty minutes more. Put the jelly into small jars, and before it sets drop in the nuts. Lemon juice may be added instead of ginger if preferred.
A ginger-scented apple jelly of the old type, relying on the fruit's own pectin rather than added commercial pectin. The printed method has one clear garble worth sorting out before you start.
- The sugar is listed twiceAs printed, you boil the liquor twenty minutes, then "add the sugar and ginger" and boil twenty more. Add the sugar once, after the first twenty-minute reduction of the strained juice, along with the ginger.
- Weigh the juice, not the fruitThree-quarters of a pound of sugar per pint of strained liquor is about 1 3/4 cups sugar per US pint. If this edition is using imperial pints (20 fl oz), the ratio works out slightly leaner in sugar, which only means a marginally longer boil.
- Prepare the apples wholeQuarter them but leave skins and cores in; that is where most of the pectin and acid sits. Tart, slightly underripe cooking apples set far better than sweet dessert varieties.
- Strain properlyA sieve alone gives cloudy jelly. Hang the pulp in a jelly bag or several layers of scalded cheesecloth and let it drip; squeezing forces through starch and clouds the result.
- Root gingerProbably dried whole ginger root, though the recipe does not specify; bruise it and tie it in muslin so it can be lifted out. Fresh ginger will work but is milder by weight. The recipe does not say at what point the teaspoon of ground ginger is added.
- Judge the set, not the clockTwenty minutes is a guide. Jelly sets at about 220F (104C) at sea level, or when a spoonful wrinkles on a chilled saucer. Overboiling darkens it and turns it gummy.
- The almonds change the keepingWhole blanched almonds dropped into the hot jelly create pockets of low acid and moisture, so treat these as refrigerator jars to be eaten within a few weeks rather than shelf-stable preserves. Warm the jars first so they do not crack.
Apple jelly appears widely in English-language cookbooks of the period because apples supply both pectin and acid in abundance, and so set reliably without the powdered and liquid pectins that came into general household use later in the twentieth century. Ginger, cheap and long-keeping, gave a bland jelly character; the alternative offered at the end, lemon juice, does the same job by sharpening the acidity.