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Mint Jelly
Follow the recipe for Apple Jelly, adding oil of peppermint to Javor.
A one-line variation that leans entirely on the book's Apple Jelly recipe. Almost everything that matters here is dosage and where the mint flavour comes in.
- "Javor" is a typoThe word is flavor — add oil of peppermint to taste. Nothing is missing from the line.
- Oil of peppermint is not chopped mintThis is a distilled essential oil, sold by druggists as a flavouring in the period. Buy one labelled food grade, and treat it as a flavouring measured in drops, not spoons.
- DoseTwo or three drops per pint of finished jelly is a starting point, stirred in off the heat after skimming; a quarter teaspoon will make the whole batch taste medicinal. Add, stir, taste on a cold spoon, repeat.
- Add it lateVolatile oils flash off in a boiling kettle. Bring the apple jelly to its set first, pull the pan from the heat, then flavour and pour.
- Mint jelly is usually spearmintModern mint jelly for lamb is made with spearmint, which is grassy and sweet; peppermint is sharply cool and reads as confectionery. If you want the familiar lamb accompaniment, infuse fresh spearmint in the hot juice instead of using the oil.
- The base recipeThe book's Apple Jelly recipe is not reproduced here; standard apple jelly is tart apples (windfalls and cores are ideal, being high in pectin) cooked with water, dripped through a jelly bag, then boiled with sugar to the set — 220°F at sea level, or until it sheets off the spoon.
- ColourApple jelly sets a pale amber. The green mint jelly sold in jars is dyed; a drop or two of food colouring added with the oil gets you there, and leaving it out changes nothing but appearance.
- Sealing and yieldJelly this acidic and this sweet keeps well, but process filled half-pint jars in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes rather than relying on a paraffin seal.
Mint jelly earns its place in a canning chapter because it is not really a preserve of mint at all — it is apple jelly, the most reliable set in the home kitchen before commercial pectin was common, borrowing a flavour. Tart apples and their cores are naturally rich in pectin and acid, so cooks used apple juice as a neutral base for herb, wine and flower jellies of every sort. The pairing of mint with lamb is generally traced to English cookery, where mint sauce, sharp with vinegar, long preceded the sweeter jelly. The instruction to reach for oil of peppermint rather than a bunch of mint reflects an era when a druggist's shelf of flavouring oils — lemon, almond, wintergreen, peppermint — was available to the cook.