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Transcendent Crab-Apple Jelly
Transcendents or any variety of crab-apples, may be prepared as cultivated wild plums, adding flavoring of almond, lemon, peach, pine-apple or vanilla to the jelly in the proportion of one tea-spoon to two pints, or more if it is wished stronger, just before it is done.
This is a variation note rather than a standalone recipe: it sends you to the book's method for wild plums and tells you what to do differently. The useful information is in the flavouring ratio and in what crab apples do on their own.
- The cross-referenceThe recipe simply directs you to the book's method for cultivated wild plums; that method is not given on this page. Jelly making of the period generally ran: fruit barely covered with water, simmered until soft, drained through a jelly bag without pressing, then the strained juice boiled with sugar. Crab apples were usually cooked whole and unpeeled, cores included, since cores and skins carry much of the pectin.
- TranscendentsThe Transcendent was a widely planted 19th-century Siberian crab hybrid, larger and yellower than a wild crab. Any tart crab apple works; a mix of slightly underripe and ripe fruit gives the best set.
- No added pectinCrab apples are among the most pectin-rich fruits in the kitchen, which is why they need nothing but sugar. Do not add commercial pectin to this or the jelly will be stiff and rubbery.
- Sugar and the setPeriod practice was roughly equal weights, or a pound of sugar to a pint of juice. Boil to 220F (8F above the boil at your altitude), or until a chilled spoon sheets rather than drips.
- Add flavour off the heatAdd flavour at the very end — the recipe says 'just before it is done.' Extracts are volatile, so they go in at the end of cooking rather than early. One teaspoon to two pints is a modest dose; the recipe itself allows more if a stronger flavour is wanted.
- Almond flavouringModern almond extract is benzaldehyde in alcohol and is harmless. The 19th-century "essence of bitter almonds" it replaced was a different product, made from the kernels themselves and carrying traces of cyanide; the two are not interchangeable and old dosing advice should not be applied to homemade kernel infusions.
- YieldTwo pints of strained juice with sugar gives about four to five half-pint jars. Fill hot jars, leave a quarter-inch of headspace, and process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes; the fruit is acidic enough that this is all the treatment it needs.
Crab apples were a hedgerow and dooryard fruit rather than a dessert one, too sour and astringent to eat out of hand but so full of pectin and acid that they set into jelly almost without help, which is exactly what made them valuable before commercial pectin existed in the 1910s. Named cultivars like the Transcendent, a Siberian crab hybrid promoted heavily by American nurseries in the second half of the 19th century, were selected for size and colour, and such fruit is often said to have been able to carry a preserve on its own rather than serving only as a pectin source for weaker fruits. The instruction to add almond, lemon, peach, pineapple or vanilla shows the other half of the story: manufactured flavouring extracts had become cheap and shelf-stable, and a household could turn one bushel of a plain, sharp, thoroughly local fruit into five different labelled jars on the pantry shelf.