Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › American Crab-Apple Jelly
American Crab-Apple Jelly
Prepare the apples by removing the stems and unsound parts, if any, and wipe them dry; cut them in halves, and put them into a preserving-pan with enough water to cover the bottom. When the fruit is quite soft pour off the water, and for every pint allow one pound of preserving-sugar. Place this in a preserving-pan with some slices of lemon-peel, and let it boil slowly for half an hour or so, removing the scum as it rises. Have one ounce of gelatine dissolved in some water, and just before removing the jelly from the fire stir the gelatine in rapidly. Fill some moulds or glasses with the jelly, and place the on ice to set. It will keep for a considerable time. When required dip the mould for an instant in hot water, wipe dry and turn out onto a glass dish, If placed in jelly-glasses they can be served in them. The fruit may be used for a number of other purposes.
A gelatine-set fruit jelly rather than a modern pectin preserve, and the instructions assume a cook who already knows how to run a jelly bag. A few things need translating before this works.
- The hinge: do not boil the gelatineGelatine loses strength when held at a rolling boil. The recipe has you stir it in "just before removing the jelly from the fire," at the very end of the cooking; safer still is to dissolve it in a little cool water first, then in warm, and add it once the pan is pulled from the heat.
- "Pour off the water" means keep the juiceWhat comes off the softened fruit is the jelly liquid, not waste. Strain it through a scalded jelly bag or several layers of cheesecloth and let it drip without squeezing, or the jelly will be cloudy.
- "For every pint allow one pound"A pint of strained juice to a pound of sugar. That is roughly 475 ml juice to 450 g sugar, a standard preserving ratio of the period, and it is what makes the jelly keep.
- Preserving-sugarCoarse-grained cane sugar sold for jam-making because it dissolves cleanly and throws less scum. Ordinary granulated sugar works; skim a little more attentively.
- One ounce of gelatineAbout 28 g, or four standard envelopes of powdered gelatine — enough to set several pints firmly for turning out of a mould. Crab apples are high in pectin and a well-boiled juice will often set on its own, so for glasses rather than moulds you can use considerably less.
- Half an hour of slow boilingTime is a guide, not a test. Look for 220F on a thermometer, or a spoonful that wrinkles on a chilled saucer, before the gelatine goes in.
- KeepingSet on ice and served from the mould, this is a refrigerator preserve. Treat it as one — a few weeks cold, covered — rather than reading "it will keep for a considerable time" as permission to store it in a cupboard, since there are no processing times or sealing instructions here.
Crab apples were a hedgerow and dooryard fruit long before they were an ornamental one, and American species such as Malus coronaria and the Soulard crab were valued precisely for what makes them inedible raw — hard acidity and a very high pectin content, the two things that make a clear, firm jelly with nothing added. That the recipe reaches for an ounce of gelatine anyway says something about the Waldorf kitchen's priorities: this is jelly meant to be unmoulded whole onto a glass dish and carried into a dining room, not spooned from a jar, and a gelatine set is more reliable for that than pectin alone. Oscar Tschirky, who was the hotel's maître d'hôtel rather than its chef, assembled this book in the 1890s from the working repertoire of a house that served both American game dinners and French service, and a tart apple jelly sat comfortably in either — alongside roast venison and wild fowl in one idiom, as a sweet gelée in the other.