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Apple Marmalade
Peel and finely slice twenty-five pounds ripe apples, place in large saucepan with a quart cold water and juice of a lemon, cover pan, slowly cook until soft, remove and press through sieve into an earthen basin. Place in a copper basin three-quarters of a pound granulated sugar to every pound of marmalade, add two gills cold water, one vanilla stick, and cook on a brisk fire for ten minutes. Add marmalade, constantly stir while cooking for twelve minutes, remove, take up vanilla bean, wipe, and place in sugar, then place marmalade in stone jars and let cool. Cover with white paper lightly dipped in brandy, tightly cover jars, lay in a cool place and use as required.
A hotel-scale preserve written for a professional larder, with copper pans and a paper-and-brandy seal. It reduces cleanly to a domestic batch, but the sugar is measured against the cooked pulp rather than the raw fruit, which is easy to miss.
- Scale it downTwenty-five pounds of apples is roughly half a bushel and will yield something in the region of twenty pints of finished marmalade. A fifth of the recipe — 5 lb apples, about 3/4 cup water, the juice of a lemon — behaves the same way and fits a normal preserving pan.
- The sugar is weighed against the pulpThree-quarters of a pound of sugar per pound of marmalade, not per pound of raw apples. Weigh the sieved purée after it has drained, then calculate; peel, core and evaporation will have taken it down considerably.
- Gills and vesselsA gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup of water. The "copper basin" would have been a preserving pan, most likely unlined copper, valued because copper conducts heat evenly; a wide stainless or enamelled pan does the same job.
- Brisk fireRead this as full heat. The sugar and water are being brought to a heavy syrup before the fruit goes in — ten minutes at a hard boil, not a simmer.
- Judge the set, not the clockTwelve minutes of stirring is a starting point. Apples are generously pectic, but ripe fruit varies; test on a chilled saucer and stop when a spoonful wrinkles rather than runs.
- SievingA food mill with a medium plate does in a few minutes what the original expects of a sieve. Cook the apples slowly and covered, as directed, or they will catch before they collapse.
- The vanilla beanOne whole pod for a batch this size is restrained; a split pod releases far more. The instruction to wipe it and bury it in the sugar canister is sound thrift and still worth following.
- StorageBrandy-soaked paper under a tight lid was the standard mould guard of the period and relies on a cool larder. For keeping at room temperature now, fill sterilised jars hot and process in a boiling-water bath according to current guidance; otherwise treat it as a refrigerator preserve and use it within a few weeks.
Marmalade in the older English sense meant any fruit paste stiff enough to slice — the word comes through Portuguese marmelada, from marmelo, quince, the fruit originally used — and only narrowed to the citrus preserve in later British usage. This apple version, sieved smooth, sweetened three-parts to four and scented with a single vanilla pod, sits between what a modern cook would call apple butter and a soft jam. The quantities give away the setting: twenty-five pounds of fruit and stone jars laid down in a cool place belong to a restaurant or a large household running a stocked larder, which is what Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, was writing for when he compiled his international collection in the first decade of the twentieth century. Apples were the obvious raw material — cheap by the barrel in autumn, naturally high in pectin, and forgiving of a cook working at volume.