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Jelly for Cake
Peel and core a few apples; pound and mix one breakfast cupful of powdered sugar and the grated peel and juice of one lemon. When mixed put in a jar, stand in a saucepan, surround with boiling water, and let it stand until cooked. Jelly prepared in this way is used for spreading over sponge-cake.
A one-paragraph apple butter in all but name, cooked gently in a jar set in simmering water. The quantities are loose even by 1896 standards, so treat this as a method rather than a formula.
- The hinge: gentle, indirect heatThe jar standing in boiling water is an improvised double boiler, and that is the whole point — sugar and fruit pulp scorch instantly over direct flame. Keep the water at a bare simmer and topped up, and set a folded towel or a rack under the jar so it is not sitting on bare metal.
- Quantities are genuinely vague"A few apples" is unresolvable. For one breakfast cupful of sugar, about 3 medium tart apples (roughly 1 lb prepared) gives a spreadable result; more apple gives a thicker, less sweet paste.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup — reckon 8 to 10 fl oz. One cup of granulated sugar is a fair modern stand-in for the powdered sugar, which in this period meant finely ground granulated, not today's icing sugar with its cornstarch.
- "Pound" means reduce to pulp"Pound" — 'Pound' here is ambiguous: the sentence can be read as pounding the apples, or as pounding the sugar before mixing it with the fruit and lemon. If you take it as the apples, mash or grate them to a pulp; the finer the pulp, the smoother the finished spread.
- Do not seal the jarCover loosely with foil or leave open so steam escapes. A tightly closed jar in a pan of boiling water builds pressure, and this is not a preserving method — nothing here is being sterilised or sealed for storage.
- Timing"Until cooked" is not timed in the original. Expect roughly an hour of gentle cooking, longer if the fruit was left coarse. Judge by eye: it is done when the pulp is translucent, glossy and holds a line when a spoon is drawn through it.
- Peeled apples set softlyMuch of an apple's pectin sits in the peel and core, which this recipe discards, so expect a thick spread rather than a cut-and-hold jelly. That suits its purpose — spreading on sponge cake — but do not wait for it to gel firmly.
- Yield and keepingAbout one cup, enough to fill and top a single sponge layer cake. Refrigerate and use within a week; without proper canning it will not keep on a shelf.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 volume was assembled when the Waldorf's dining room was already well known. The word "jelly" in nineteenth-century usage covered a wide range of set and semi-set fruit preparations, and a soft cooked apple paste for spreading between cake layers sat comfortably under it — the French would have called much the same thing a marmelade de pommes. Apples were the reliable choice because their natural pectin sets without commercial additives, which were not on the market when this book was printed; powdered pectin only became a household product in the following decades. The jar-in-a-saucepan technique is the old bain-marie in its plainest form, and it appears throughout period cookery wherever sugar and fruit had to be cooked long without catching.