Home › Fruit Desserts › Apple Jelly No. 2
Apple Jelly No. 2
6 pounds of apples 3 pints of water Lump sugar Peel, core, and cut up the apples, and bake in a stew jar with three pints of water. When a pulp, turn into a jelly bag, and hang over a pan all night for juice to run through. To every pint of juice add one pound lump sugar, and boil one hour; when properly done, it will be stiff. Put into air-tight jars.
A straightforward long-boil apple jelly of the sort that relies on the fruit's own pectin. Two things in the original need rethinking: the hour of boiling and the bare instruction to seal in jars.
- Do not boil for a full hourAn hour at a rolling boil will carry most batches well past the setting point into a dark, sticky caramel. Boil hard and start testing at about 10 minutes: the jelly is done at 220F (or 8F above the boiling point of water where you live), or when a spoonful wrinkles on a chilled saucer.
- Lump sugarLoaf or lump sugar was refined white sugar; the refined loaf was cast in a cone and broken or cut into lumps for sale. Modern granulated sugar is a close equivalent and dissolves faster.
- Keep the peels and coresThe recipe has you discard exactly the parts richest in pectin. Cooking the peels and cores along with the flesh, in a muslin bag or loose to be strained out later, gives a much more reliable set. Slightly underripe apples set better than fully ripe ones.
- The stew jarA covered stoneware crock, set in the oven or in a pan of water. A lidded Dutch oven or heavy covered pot works. The original gives no oven heat; a moderate oven of about 325F is a reasonable modern equivalent, or simply simmer covered on the hob until the fruit collapses, 40 minutes to an hour.
- Never squeeze the jelly bagOvernight dripping is the whole point of hanging it. Pressing or wringing the bag forces pulp through and gives cloudy jelly.
- Sugar ratioA pound of sugar to a pint of juice is a high but standard preserving proportion: about 2 1/4 cups sugar to a pint of juice, and note that an imperial pint is 2 1/2 cups rather than 2. Measure the juice and weigh the sugar rather than eyeballing either, since the set depends on the proportion.
- Sealing"Air-tight jars" in a book of this date would most likely have meant hot jars sealed with wax or a screw cap and left in the larder. Current practice is to fill sterilised jars to 1/4 inch of the rim and process in a boiling water bath for at least 5 minutes; unprocessed jars should be treated as refrigerator jelly.
- YieldSix pounds of apples with three pints of water yields roughly three to four pints of juice; with a pound of sugar to each pint that works out at something like seven to ten half-pint jars, depending on how far you reduce it. Measure the juice as it comes off the bag and scale the sugar to it.
Apple jelly earns its place in a cookbook the same way it earned its place in nearly every nineteenth- and early twentieth-century household manual: apples were cheap, kept well, and carry enough natural pectin and acid to set without any added commercial pectin, which only became widely available in the 1910s and 20s. The technique here — bake them to a pulp, hang overnight through a bag, boil with sugar by the pint — is the standard English jelly method of the period, and the numbering of the recipe as "No. 2" suggests the compiler was gathering variants rather than inventing them.