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Apple Jelly
Wash the apples; remove stem and blossom ends and cut into quarters. Put them in a preserving kettle, adding enough cold water to come nearly to the top of the apples. Cover and cook gently until the apples are soft and clear. Mash the apples and drain them through a sieve in which two thicknesses of cheesecloth have been laid or through a jelly bag. Avoid squeezing the bag or the jelly will be clouded. Boil twenty minutes and add the heated sugar, allowing two cups or one pound to every pint of juice. Boil five minutes; skim, and test by putting a teaspoon of juice in a cool saucer. If it jellies at once, remove from the fire and pour into sterilized glasses.
A no-pectin, two-ingredient jelly that depends entirely on the fruit. Everything hinges on choosing apples with enough natural pectin and acid, since nothing else in the recipe will set it.
- Choose the apples for pectin, not flavorUse tart, slightly underripe apples — crabapples, Granny Smith, or windfalls — and include the skins and cores, which is why the recipe says only to quarter them. Fully ripe or mealy sweet apples have lost much of their pectin and will give you syrup.
- Preserving kettleA wide, heavy, non-reactive pot: stainless steel or enameled cast iron. Aluminum and bare copper react with the fruit acid. Width matters more than depth, since the 20-minute boil is meant to concentrate the juice by evaporation.
- Do not squeeze the bagThis is the one instruction to obey literally. Pressing the pulp through pushes starch and fine solids into the juice and gives a cloudy jelly that no amount of skimming will clear. Let it drip, ideally several hours or overnight in the refrigerator.
- Heated sugarThe recipe says only to heat the sugar; a common way to do it is to warm it in a low oven or in a pan on the stove until barely warm to the touch. The point is practical rather than decorative: sugar added cold drops the temperature of the juice and lengthens the boiling.
- The proportionTwo cups sugar to one pint of strained juice, measured by volume, is a standard 1:1 ratio. Measure the juice after the 20-minute boil, not before, or you will oversweeten and may prevent a set.
- Judging the setThe chilled-saucer test works, but the sheet test is more reliable: lift a spoonful and let it fall, and the jelly is done when it drops off in a single sheet rather than in drops. By thermometer this is roughly 220F at sea level, 8 degrees above the boiling point of water. Five minutes is often optimistic; some batches want ten or more.
- Small batches onlyWork with about 4 to 6 cups of juice at a time. Large volumes need long boiling to reach the setting point, which breaks down the pectin you are relying on and turns the jelly brown.
- Sealing'Sterilized glasses' of this era were often jelly tumblers topped with melted paraffin, a method no longer recommended, since the wax can crack and admit mold. Use half-pint canning jars with two-piece lids and process 5 to 10 minutes in a boiling water bath.
- YieldYields vary with the apples, but expect roughly a cup or so of juice per pound of fruit; a pint of juice with its sugar makes about two half-pint jars.
Apple jelly is the foundation recipe of the American preserving shelf because apples supply their own pectin — the skins and cores are the richest source, which is why this recipe pointedly does not peel them. Before commercial pectin became widely available — liquid preparations first, powdered products later — cooks extracted pectin from tart apples or currants and used it to set fruits that had little of their own, and apple-juice stock could be kept on hand for exactly that purpose. A cookbook of this kind, built to be added to and revised by the household, treats canning and preserving as a seasonal duty rather than a hobby: a bushel of windfall apples that could not be stored became jelly, and the pulp left in the bag might be cooked down again into apple butter or a second, weaker "after-jelly" rather than thrown out.