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Apple Jelly
Wipe apples, remove stem and blossom ends, and cut in quarters. Put in a granite or porcelain-lined preserving kettle, and add cold water to come nearly to top of apples. Cover, and cook slowly until apples are soft; mash, and drain through a coarse sieve. Avoid squeezing apples, which makes jelly cloudy. Then allow juice to drip through a double thickness of cheese-cloth or a jelly bag. Boil twenty minutes, and add an equal quantity of heated sugar; boil five minutes, skim, and turn in glasses. Put in a sunny window, and let stand twenty-four hours. Cover, and keep in a cool, dry place. Porter apples make a delicious flavored jelly. If apples are pared, a much lighter jelly may be made. Gravenstein apples make a very spicy jelly.
To Heat Sugar. Put in a granite dish, place in oven, leaving oven door ajar, and stir occasionally.
An old-style jelly made without commercial pectin, so everything depends on the apples themselves. Choose fruit that is slightly underripe and tart, cores and peels included, since that is where the pectin and acid live.
- The hinge: don't squeeze the pulpThe instruction to let the juice drip untouched is the whole difference between clear jelly and cloudy. Expect the bag to drip for several hours or overnight; resist wringing it even at the end.
- Granite or porcelain-lined kettle"Granite" here means granite-ware, that is speckled enamelled steel. Any enamelled, stainless or other non-reactive pot works; avoid bare aluminium or copper with this much fruit acid.
- "An equal quantity" of sugarMeasure the juice by volume and add the same volume of sugar: a cup of juice to a cup of sugar. The recipe does not say whether the measuring is meant to happen before or after the twenty-minute boil.
- Test the set, don't trust the clockFive minutes after the sugar is a starting point only. Go by a thermometer at 220F at sea level, or by the sheet test: jelly falling from a cold spoon in two drops that merge and slide off in a sheet.
- Heating the sugarWarming the sugar keeps the boil from stalling when it goes in; the recipe specifies only an oven with the door left ajar, giving no temperature. It is optional with modern burners, but harmless.
- The sunny windowTwenty-four hours in the sun was traditionally held to finish the set and dry the surface before the glasses were covered. It is not a preserving step, and modern jars can simply be left undisturbed at room temperature until firm.
- Sealing and storageThe original assumes open-topped tumblers sealed with melted paraffin. Current practice is hot jelly into hot sterilised canning jars with two-piece lids, processed in a boiling water bath, or else refrigerate and use within a few weeks.
- Apple varietiesPorter and Gravenstein are heirloom varieties long grown in New England orchards -- Porter of Massachusetts origin, Gravenstein originally northern European -- and still found at orchards and farmers' markets. Any tart, firm early apple with good acid behaves the same way; sweet dessert apples such as Fuji or Gala set poorly.
- YieldAbout 4 lb of apples gives roughly 4 cups of strained juice and four to five 8-ounce glasses of jelly, depending on how far you reduce it.
Apple jelly earned its place in a New England cookbook because apples were, by most accounts, among the fruits a household was likeliest to have in quantity, and because their skins and cores are unusually rich in pectin and acid: the two things a jelly needs and the two things nineteenth-century cooks had no way to buy. Commercial pectin was not sold to home cooks until the 1910s, so recipes of this vintage rely entirely on the fruit, on hard boiling to concentrate it, and on the cook's eye for the sheet test. The named varieties are telling. Porter was a Massachusetts apple, raised in Sherburne in the early nineteenth century and a staple of Boston markets; Gravenstein is a much older northern European variety long grown in New England orchards. Both were valued as cooking apples rather than keepers, which is exactly why they ended up in the jelly kettle in late summer. The note that pared apples give a lighter jelly reflects a period taste for pale, clear preserves that showed well in a glass on a sunny sill.