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Canned Porter Apples
Wipe, quarter, core, and pare Porter apples, then weigh. Make a syrup by boiling for ten minutes one-third their weight in sugar with water, allowing two and one-half cups to each pound of sugar. Cook apples in syrup until soft, doing a few at a time. Fill jars, following Directions for Canning.
A thin-syrup apple pack from an era when the syrup was calculated by weight rather than by cup. Two things need translating: the variety, and the canning method the recipe defers to.
- Porter applesAn old New England dessert apple, tender-fleshed and mildly tart, now grown almost only by heirloom orchards. Any firm cooking apple that holds its shape will do — Cortland, Golden Delicious or Northern Spy; avoid McIntosh, which collapses into sauce in hot syrup.
- Weigh after paringThe instruction is deliberate: quarter, core and pare first, then weigh. The sugar is one-third the weight of the prepared fruit, so 3 lb of pared apples takes 1 lb of sugar.
- The syrupTwo and a half cups of water to each pound of sugar (about 2 cups) gives a syrup of roughly 40 percent sugar by weight before the ten minutes' boiling concentrates it further — thin beside a heavy preserving syrup, and correct here, since the point is to keep the fruit pale rather than to candy it. One pound of sugar with its water yields close to a quart of syrup.
- "A few at a time"This is the hinge. Crowding the pan drops the syrup off the boil, and the quarters stew and break up before the outside sets. Poach in single layers, lift out as each batch turns translucent and just yields to a skewer, and let the syrup come back to a boil between batches.
- Use a current canning processThe book's "Directions for Canning" are not reproduced here; period practice of this kind was generally open-kettle — hot fruit into hot jars, sealed and left to cool. That method is no longer considered adequate, as it gives no measured heat treatment to the sealed jar and no reliable vacuum. Follow a current tested boiling-water-bath schedule for apples in syrup instead, including the altitude adjustment.
- Headspace and syrup levelWhatever the era, the fruit must stay submerged. Apples that sit above the syrup brown and dry at the top of the jar, so keep enough hot syrup in reserve to cover them.
- YieldAbout 3 lb of prepared apples fills two pint jars. Expect the pack to shrink noticeably as the fruit gives up water in the syrup.
The Porter is one of the apples that turns up in nineteenth-century American cookbooks by name and has since largely disappeared from commerce; it is generally traced to Sherburne, Massachusetts, in the early 1800s and was long a favorite around Boston for pies, sauce and canning, familiar enough that a cookbook could name it without explanation. Its listing here also shows how canning was taught in that period: not by processing time, which the recipe never mentions, but by the ratio of sugar to fruit and by the cook's judgment of when the apple was "soft." The Boston Cooking-School book treats preserving as an extension of ordinary stovetop cookery, and the shift to timed, measured heat processing came after this generation of recipes was written.