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Siberian Crab Jelly
Mrs. W. Arthurs.
Boil a peck of crabs for two hours in as much water as will cover them, then put them into a jelly bag and allow to drain, (do not squeeze them); to each pint of syrup, put one pound of loaf sugar, and boil for half an hour. Select the reddest crabs you can find and the jelly will be a beautiful colour.
"Siberian crabs" here are Siberian crabapples (Malus baccata) and its hybrids — small, hard, intensely tart fruit, not shellfish. The method is a standard extract-and-set jelly, and the only real work is judging the set.
- A peckA dry peck is eight quarts, roughly 10-12 lb of crabapples. That will yield somewhere near 5-7 pints of strained juice, depending on how juicy the fruit is.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined white sugar sold in a hard cone and broken up as needed. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct equivalent, weight for weight.
- Two hours is too longTwenty to forty minutes at a gentle simmer, until the fruit collapses, extracts the juice and the pectin. Prolonged hard boiling degrades pectin and dulls the colour the recipe is trying to preserve.
- Do not squeezeThis is the hinge. Pressing the bag forces fine pulp through and gives a cloudy, muddy jelly. Let it drip several hours or overnight, undisturbed.
- Judging the set"Boil for half an hour" is a rough guide only. Cook the juice and sugar hard and take it off at 220F/105C at sea level, or when it sheets from a cold spoon. Crabapples are high in pectin and acid, so no commercial pectin is needed and overcooking will make it stiff and caramel-flavoured.
- Whole fruitPeriod recipes often have the crabs boiled whole, stems, cores and all. That is fine for jelly, since everything is strained out, and the cores contribute pectin. Remove stem and blossom ends only if the fruit is dirty.
- The red fruitThe colour advice is sound: the pigment sits largely in the skins, so the reddest fruit gives the most strongly rose-coloured jelly. Underripe fruit in the mix raises the pectin level.
- Keeping itJelly of this date would have been run into tumblers and covered, then kept in a cool cellar. For shelf storage now, use a current tested procedure for jelly in sterilised jars with a boiling-water bath; otherwise refrigerate and use within a few weeks.
Siberian crabapples were widely planted across Ontario and the northern United States in the nineteenth century because they survived winters that killed dessert apples, and because they cropped heavily on small trees. The fruit is too sour and astringent for most tastes eaten out of hand, so it went largely into jelly, spiced pickles and cider — a preserve made from a tree grown for hardiness rather than flavour. The Home Cook Book, compiled in Toronto in 1877 by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada" as a hospital fundraiser, is full of such contributions: signed, brief, and written for cooks who already knew what a jelly bag was and how long to let it drip.