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Apple Cup
Core six tart apples and cut in quarters but do not peel. Mix with one cup of raisins, two bay leaves, a small piece of cinnamon, and the grated rind of three lemons. Put in a porcelain-lined kettle with two quarts of water and let come to a boil, then add two more quarts of water, and boil slowly, covered, for half an hour. Drain through a jelly bag. When cold add two pounds of sugar and the strained juice of three lemons. Stir until sugar is dissolved, and serve very cold.
A clear apple-and-lemon cordial, closer to a shrub or barley-water than to cider. The whole point is clarity and sharpness, so the two things to watch are the strainer and the sugar.
- Do not press the pulp"Drain through a jelly bag" means let it hang and drip, without squeezing. Forcing the fruit through clouds the cup permanently. A double layer of damp cheesecloth in a sieve set over a bowl works the same way; give it an hour.
- Porcelain-lined kettleThis is period language for a non-reactive pan: enamelled cast iron, or stainless steel. The lemon rind and apple acid will pick up a metallic taste from bare aluminium or unlined copper.
- ApplesTart cooking apples with the skins on supply both the pectin haze and the color. Granny Smith, Bramley or any hard windfall apple is right; sweet supermarket eating apples give a flat, syrupy result.
- The sugar is very highTwo pounds is about 4 1/2 cups into roughly three quarts of liquid, which makes a sweet drink by modern taste even against three lemons. Start with half, dissolve, taste, and add from there.
- Bay leavesTwo whole leaves in four quarts is a background note, not a flavor. Use dried bay and pull the leaves out with the pulp; leaving them in the finished cup turns it medicinal.
- Why the water goes in twiceThe recipe does not say. Adding the second two quarts would drop the temperature, so the half hour may have been meant as a bare simmer rather than a hard boil; a hard boil breaks the apples down and makes for a murkier result.
- Grated rindTake only the yellow zest of the three lemons, no white pith, and add the strained juice at the end as directed. Boiling the juice with the fruit would dull it.
- Yield and keepingAbout three quarts, or twelve to sixteen glasses. Refrigerate and use within four or five days; with no alcohol and no heat-sealed jar it will begin to ferment. Serve over ice, and expect ice melt to dilute it.
The "cup" is an old English name for a mixed, chilled, communal drink, as in claret cup or cider cup, and boiled fruit cups of this kind appear in American drink books of the temperance and Prohibition years. The construction here is much older than the temperance movement: fruit and spice boiled in water, strained clear, then sweetened cold and acidulated with citrus is the same logic as eighteenth-century lemonades, shrubs and barley waters, and the raisins add body and a wine-like sweetness without the wine. The bay leaf suggests period taste; savory aromatics in sweet drinks were less unusual before the twentieth century narrowed "fruit punch" to fruit and sugar alone.