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Pickled Apples
Pickled apples are a delicious accompaniment to meat. An old English rule gives these directions for their preparation: Put a half ounce of peppercorns into a small muslin • bag with a blade of mace, a stick of cinnamon, six cloves and a quarter of an ounce of root ginger. Let the spices simmer in a cupful of cider for twenty minutes. Dissolve three pounds of crushed loaf sugar in a saucepan with a pint and a half of white wine vinegar. Let it boil for five minutes. Then add six pounds of russet apples which have been peeled, cored and cut in "quarters." Add the spices, the cider and one-half the apple cores that have also been tied into a bag. Bring the vinegar again to the boiling point; then draw the pan to the side of the stove, where the apples can simmer gently until they are done. They will need careful watching in order to remove them when they are tender and before they lose their shape. Put the pickle into hot jars, removing the bags containing the spices and cores. Seal the bottles air tight.
A sweet-spiced fruit pickle of the English type, closer to a preserve than to a brined pickle. The difficulty is entirely in the last stage: apples go from firm to applesauce in the space of a few minutes.
- Watch the apples, not the clockThe instruction to draw the pan to the side of the stove means the barest simmer, with no rolling bubbles. Test a quarter with a skewer from about ten minutes on and lift them out the moment they yield but still hold an edge; a hard, dense variety may take twenty-five minutes or more.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined white sugar sold in a cone and broken up as needed. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct equivalent, weight for weight, so three pounds is about 6 3/4 cups.
- The pint measure is ambiguousThis is given as an old English rule, so a pint and a half may mean imperial pints (30 fl oz) rather than US pints (24 fl oz). Either produces a workable syrup; start with 24 fl oz and add more vinegar if the fruit is not nearly covered.
- SpicesA blade of mace is one strip of the lacy covering of nutmeg; a quarter teaspoon or so of ground mace if you cannot find whole. Root ginger here may mean either dried whole ginger root, as many old pickling rules intended, or fresh ginger sliced; a quarter ounce is only a small piece, roughly the top joint of a thumb.
- RussetsRusset apples are firm, dry-fleshed and slightly tart, which is why they survive the syrup. If you cannot get them, use another cooking apple that holds shape, and avoid soft dessert varieties, which will collapse.
- The bag of coresHalf the cores go in a muslin bag because the cores and skins carry the pectin. They thicken the syrup slightly and give it body; do not skip them, and do squeeze the bag against the side of the pan before discarding.
- Sealing and storage"Seal the bottles air tight" is open-kettle canning, which current practice no longer accepts on its own. Treat these as refrigerator pickles and eat within a couple of months, or follow a tested modern water-bath process for pickled fruit if you want them shelf-stable.
- YieldSix pounds of apples with the syrup makes a large batch; have more jars ready than you expect to need. The recipe calls it an accompaniment to meat, and it suits cold roast pork, ham or game in condiment quantities rather than as a side dish.
Spiced fruit pickled in sweetened vinegar is one of the oldest surviving strands of English preserving, descended from the medieval habit of serving sharp, spiced fruit relishes with roast and salted meat, and it kept its place on the table long after the spices themselves stopped being luxuries. Russets, hard-skinned late-keeping apples, were the standard choice because they hold together in hot syrup and were plentiful through the winter. American cookbooks of the turn of the century carried whole chapters of sweet and spiced pickles for exactly this purpose.