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Apple Jelly
Peel and cut in quarters twenty-five pounds good, sound ripe apples, place in a saucepan with just enough cold water to cover, cover pan, set on fire and cook until quite soft to the touch. Remove, carefully press all juice out of apples through heavy cloth into a basin, let stand for fifteen minutes and pass through filter into a copper basin. Add three-quarters of a pound lump sugar for every quart of juice, squeeze in juice two very sound lemons, add a vanilla stick, mix well until sugar is melted, set basin on a brisk fire and cook for a few minutes. Take up a few drops with skimmer, drop over a cold plate, and if drops do not spread like water jelly is cooked right; should it fall like water cook a few minutes longer. Lift up vanilla, wipe and place in sugar, pour jelly in earthen jars, let thoroughly cool, cork well, lay in a cool place, then jelly is ready for use.
A classic French-style apple jelly, scaled for a hotel kitchen. The method is sound; the quantities, vessels and storage need translating.
- Scale it downTwenty-five pounds of apples is a professional batch. Yield varies a good deal with the fruit, but reckon on roughly a quart of juice per five pounds. A fifth of the recipe — 5 lb of apples — gives a few small jars and behaves the same way.
- Don't peelPeel and core hold most of the pectin, and this recipe throws them away. Modern practice is to quarter the apples unpeeled and uncored and let everything go into the pot; tart, slightly underripe fruit sets far better than fully ripe.
- Copper basinUnlined copper was standard for preserves because it conducts heat evenly, but acidic fruit will leach it. Use a wide stainless or enamelled pan — width matters more than material, since evaporation is what concentrates the jelly.
- "Pass through filter"This means a jelly bag or several layers of scalded muslin. The recipe first presses the pulp, which makes cloudy juice; if you want the clear jelly the technique implies, let the juice drip unaided and resist wringing the bag.
- Lump sugar and the ratioLump sugar is simply refined cane sugar in pressed cubes — use granulated. Three-quarters of a pound per quart of juice is about 1 3/4 cups, a modest ratio that depends on the apples' own pectin and the lemon juice for its set.
- "A brisk fire"A hard, rolling boil, not a simmer. Expect 10-20 minutes for a small batch rather than the "few minutes" a shallow hotel basin needed.
- The cold-plate testDrops on a chilled plate is the plate (wrinkle) test, and it remains a reliable check. A candy thermometer reading 220F at sea level says much the same thing; test the plate anyway, since apple pectin varies from tree to tree.
- StorageCorked earthenware in a cool larder is not a seal. Ladle the boiling jelly into sterilised jars and either water-bath process them by current guidelines or keep them in the refrigerator and eat within a month. Unsealed jelly grows surface mould.
- The vanilla stickLifted out, wiped and buried in the sugar jar, a pod was expected to serve many batches. It still works, and it scents the sugar in the meantime.
Apple jelly is the thrift end of the orchard: cores, peels and windfalls too small or bruised to bake yield the pectin that sets every other jelly in the pantry, which is why nineteenth-century books so often direct cooks to save apple parings. This version, with its lump sugar, copper basin, muslin filter and single vanilla pod returned to the sugar jar, is written in the vocabulary of a professional French kitchen rather than a home cook — The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, and the scale of twenty-five pounds at a time reflects a restaurant larder stocking its own preserves. Vanilla with apple is a French pairing of long standing, and the instruction to wipe and reuse the pod is a reminder of what vanilla cost before synthetic vanillin became cheap.