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Apple Ginger
Wipe, quarter, core, pare, and chop sour apples; there should be two and one-half pounds. Put in a stewpan and add one and one-half pounds light brown sugar, juice and rind of one and one-half lemons, one-half ounce ginger root, a few grains salt, and enough water to prevent apples from burning. Cover, and cook slowly four hours, adding water as necessary. Apple Ginger may be kept for several weeks.
A long, slow apple conserve that cooks down to a dark amber spread. Nothing here is difficult, but the four hours are not negotiable — that is where the colour and the flavour come from.
- The hinge: low heat, long timeFour hours at a bare simmer in a heavy-bottomed pot, lid on, with water added whenever it looks dry. Rushed over higher heat the sugar will catch and the whole batch tastes scorched.
- Sour applesMeans a firm, high-acid cooking apple — Bramley, Granny Smith, Newtown Pippin. Sweet dessert apples give a flat, cloying result.
- Quantities in modern termsThe recipe wants 2 1/2 lb of apple after coring and paring, so start with rather more whole fruit — roughly 7 or 8 medium apples; 1 1/2 lb light brown sugar is roughly 3 1/2 cups packed.
- The gingerHalf an ounce is about 14 g. The recipe does not say whether the root is fresh or dried, nor how to prepare it; some preserves of the period tie bruised root in muslin so it can be lifted out at the end. If you use fresh root, grate or slice it thin — whole dried root left loose in the pot gives woody splinters.
- Lemon rindPare the zest off in strips with a peeler and keep the white pith out of it, or the finished conserve turns bitter over four hours of cooking. Add the juice at the same time.
- Judging donenessIt is finished when the apple has gone translucent and dark and a spoon drawn across the bottom leaves a track that closes slowly. The recipe gives no yield; expect somewhere in the region of three half-pint jars.
- Keeping it"Several weeks" presupposes a cold larder, and preserves of this period were often sealed under a paraffin cap. Pack it hot into clean jars and keep it in the refrigerator; if you want it shelf-stable, follow a current tested water-bath processing schedule for fruit preserves.
Apple ginger belongs to a family of Victorian household preserves that used ginger to lift a cheap, abundant fruit into something more of a treat — the same instinct behind marrow and ginger jam and rhubarb and ginger, and behind the mock-preserved-ginger recipes found in nineteenth-century English cookery, where ordinary produce was cooked down in sugar and spice in place of costly imported Chinese preserved ginger. Preparations of this kind were written for a kitchen where autumn apples had to be turned into something that would last the winter. The light brown sugar is worth noting: less refined sugars were generally cheaper and darker than white, and they contribute to the deep colour of the finished conserve.