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Apple Jelly (Take seven pounds of ripe)
Take seven pounds of ripe apples-such as are excellent boilers and if the rind is red the colour of the jelly will be beautifully tinged; cut the fruit in pieces, without peeling or extracting the cores, and only removing the stalks and the eyes; add two quarts of water, and boil or bake till the whole is a pulp, which pour into a jelly bag, placed near the fire, (as the pulp thickens in cooling); add eight ounces of white or loaf sugar to each pint of the liquid, with the juice of a small lemon, and the peel cut very thin; boil to a tolerably thick jelly, which may be ascertained by trying a little on a plate; strain again through the bag or a piece of muslin, and run into moulds or pots. When cold lay a piece of tissue paper over, and put by in a dry place. This jelly will keep two or three years.
TO MAKE AN ORNAMENTAL PYRAMID FOR A
A straightforward pectin-extraction jelly from the era before commercial pectin, when the cores, skins and pips did all the setting work. A few of its instructions need translating.
- Do not peel or coreThis is the hinge of the recipe. Much of the pectin sits in the cores, pips and skins, and removing them gives a syrup that sets poorly if at all. Slightly underripe apples tend to set better than fully ripe ones for the same reason.
- Sugar per pintEight ounces of sugar to a pint of juice is a comparatively low-sugar jelly by later standards, which is why it needs a long boil. The book is Canadian and may intend the imperial pint of 20 fl oz rather than the US 16; the difference is real but not critical, since you are boiling to a set rather than to a fixed time.
- Loaf sugarLoaf or white sugar was refined cane sold in cones and broken up as needed. Ordinary granulated white sugar is the direct equivalent.
- Baking the fruitThe alternative given here, baking the apples with the water in a covered dish, needs no more than a moderate oven and enough time for the fruit to collapse completely; the book specifies neither heat nor time. It is often said to give a cleaner flavour than a hard boil. Either way the fruit should collapse completely.
- The jelly bagHang it and let it drip; do not squeeze or press, or the jelly turns cloudy. "Placed near the fire" simply means kept warm so the pulp stays fluid and drains, which a warm kitchen or a low oven with the door ajar will manage. Straining overnight is usual.
- Testing the setThe plate test still works: a spoonful chilled on a cold saucer should wrinkle when pushed. If you prefer a number, the setting point is 220F, about 8F above the boiling point of water where you live.
- Storage and the tissue paperTissue laid over the surface, sometimes brandy-dipped, was the standard mould-guard before reliable seals. It is not a seal. For keeping, pour boiling-hot jelly into sterilised jars and process in a boiling-water bath, or refrigerate. The claim that it keeps two or three years assumes a cold, dry larder and a wax or paper cover checked regularly.
- YieldSeven pounds of apples with two quarts of water gives roughly three to four pints of strained juice, and a finished yield of several half-pint jars depending on how far you reduce it.
- The trailing lineThe sentence beginning "TO MAKE AN ORNAMENTAL PYRAMID FOR A" is the catchline of the next recipe in the book and forms no part of this one.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in 1877 by "ladies of Toronto and other cities and towns", and is generally credited as the first Canadian fundraising cookbook, its proceeds going to the Hospital for Sick Children. Like most community books of the period it borrowed freely from English and American printed sources, and this jelly reads like an English recipe: loaf sugar, a jelly bag hung by the fire, moulds and pots covered with tissue. Apple jelly earned its place in every nineteenth-century household manual because apples were cheap, kept badly once bruised, and were a reliable common source of pectin — the substance that let a cook set a jelly with nothing but fruit, sugar and boiling. The note about red-skinned apples tinting the jelly is a cook's observation rather than a chemist's: the colour comes from anthocyanins in the peel, which is precisely the part the recipe insists you leave on.