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Quarters (in imitation of Ginger)
INGREDIENTS.-6 lbs. of apples, 4½ lbs. of sugar, 2oz. of the best white ginger, 1 pint of water.
AVERAGE COST, for this quantity, 2s.
Peel, core, and quarter the apples, and put the fruit, sugar, and ginger in layers into a wide-mouthed jar, and let them remain for 2 days; then infuse the ginger in 1 pint of boiling water, and cover it closely, and let it remain for 1 day. Put the apples, &c., into a preserving-pan with the water strained from the ginger, and boil till the apples look clear and the syrup is rich, which will be in about an hour. The rind of a lemon may be added just before the apples have finished boiling; and great care must be taken not to break the pieces of apple in putting them into the jars.
Serve on glass dishes for dessert.
TIME.-2 days for the apples to remain in the jar with sugar, &c.; 1 day to infuse the ginger; about 1 hour to boil the apples.
SEASONABLE, this should be made in September, October or November.
Apricot Bouchées. - INGREDIENTS for 1 dozen. tin of apricots, or 6 French ones if in season, some puff paste (the cuttings APRICOT JAM. from tarts serve for these), loaf sugar, 1/4 pint of cream. AVERAGE COST, 1s.
Stamp out small rounds of paste and make a smaller indentation with a round cutter about the size of the fruit, sift over powdered sugar and bake a nice brown in a quick oven.
If fresh fruit is used, cut them in half, take out the stones, and boil in syrup made from loaf sugar nd a little water for a few minutes till tender; the others require no preparation. When the pastry comes out of the oven, press lightly in the centre of each piece to make room for the fruit, and when both are cold lay 1/2 an apricot hollow upwards in each and fill with the cream whipped to a froth.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A high-sugar apple preserve flavoured heavily with dried ginger, meant to stand in for the costly Chinese preserved ginger of the period. The whole point is intact, translucent quarters, so almost every decision follows from not breaking them.
- The hinge: no stirringThe hinge: handle the fruit as little as possible -- once the apples go into the pan, move them by shaking the pan or lifting with a slotted spoon rather than stirring. The recipe says to boil for about an hour and warns only against breaking the pieces when putting them into the jars; keeping the pan at a gentle simmer is a modern precaution to keep the quarters whole.
- "Best white ginger"This means whole dried ginger root, scraped and often lime-bleached, sold in hard pale knobs. Substitute 2 oz of whole dried ginger, bruised with a rolling pin before infusing. Ground ginger will cloud the syrup and give a dusty texture; fresh root gives a sharper, less resinous flavour and is not the same thing.
- Imperial pintsA pint here is 20 imperial fl oz (about 570 ml), a little under 2 1/2 US cups. The same applies to the 1/4 pint of cream in the apricot recipe printed after it: 5 imperial fl oz, about 140 ml, a scant 2/3 cup.
- Apple choiceUse a firm cooking apple with some acidity and pectin that holds its shape, such as Granny Smith or a firm russet; Bramley, the usual English cooker, tends to collapse. Soft eating apples will not survive an hour in syrup.
- The two-day layeringThis is a dry sugar cure, not a waiting game for its own sake. The sugar draws juice out of the apples and firms the flesh, which is what lets the quarters stay whole later. Cover the jar and keep it cool; expect a good deal of liquid in the bottom by the second day, and use it.
- "Preserving-pan"A wide, shallow, heavy pan, traditionally unlined copper. Any wide stainless or enamelled pan works; width matters more than depth because it lets the syrup reduce without deep boiling. Avoid bare aluminium or cast iron with this much acid.
- Judging the syrupReady when the apple pieces look glassy and the syrup falls from the spoon in heavy drops rather than running thin. If you want a number, around 220F is the setting range for a sugar preserve; the hour given is a guide, not a rule.
- StorageThe recipe gives no sealing or processing instruction, as was normal for preserves of the period. Pack hot into clean jars, cool, and keep it in the refrigerator, using it within a few weeks; treat it as a fresh dessert preserve rather than a shelf-stable one, or follow a current tested canning process.
- Yield and servingServing -- Beeton's instruction to serve on glass dishes for dessert is literal: the quarters were set out whole in their syrup as a sweetmeat, not spread on bread.
- The stray second recipeThe Apricot Bouches that follow belong to a separate entry that ran on in the original page. A "quick oven" there means 425-450F, and the pastry rounds bake in about 10-12 minutes.
Preserved ginger reached Victorian Britain in stoneware jars from China and was expensive enough that cookery books offered imitations, of which this is a straightforward example: cheap autumn apples, translucent from a long sugar cure, carrying the flavour of a heavy dried-ginger infusion. The technique of layering fruit with dry sugar for a day or two before boiling was common in nineteenth-century preserving and is still the reason old recipes produce firmer, more intact fruit than a quick modern jam; the September-to-November season noted at the end reflects a household putting up the orchard crop rather than buying fruit year-round.