From Apple Jellies

It’s 7:30 and I’m watching the sunrise. I do this every morning, and (lucky me?), I get the full effect, since I’m up at 5:00. Nowadays, it’s still completely black at five, so I wait for the sun with great anticipation. My desk faces the window, so I get to watch all the phases of light in the morning while I sit on the phone discussing the present perfect tense or the differences between “say” and “tell” with my students. My favourite phase of sunrise comes just after the sun is up, when a beautiful apricot light illuminates the apartment and everything in it lights up with gold.

One of the lovely idiosyncrasies of our apartment is that, although our windows are completely east-facing, we get a beautiful sunset to go along with the sunrise I witness every morning. Impossible, you say? Never! You see, directly east of us is the downtown core, a place full of mirrored glass buildings. We get a pre-sunset reflection off those glass buildings that fills our evening with the same apricot gold that I see every morning.  An urban sunset!

The reason I’m telling you this is that when I was looking through pictures of the apple jellies I made over the weekend, they reminded me of my lucky sunrise-sunset. While they’re not exactly the same colour, they have a sunny peachy tone that makes me think of the sky at sunrise.

Anyway, I discovered this apple jelly recipe in Alice Waters’ “The Art of Simple Food,” which I’ve raved about before. It’s a simple but not a quick recipe. If you’ve got good apples, it’s well worth your time. Mine came from a tree in my parents’ backyard.

Sugared, these jellies are great little treats. Alice Waters also recommends keeping them unsugared as a cheese-platter addition. They’d be fantastic with a hard, full-flavoured cheese. I meant to try it out, but my jellies have all disappeared! They’re almost as fleeting as the sunset.

APPLE JELLIES

3 pounds of apples, quartered and seeded
1 cup water

1 1/2 cups sugar
2 Tbsp. lemon juice

Line a lightly greased 8×8 square baking dish (or a 9″ round cake pan, if you’re like me and don’t have a square) with waxed paper. Set the baking dish aside.

Cook apples with water in a covered heavy-bottomed pot until very soft. This should take about 20 minutes.

When the apples are soft, remove them from the heat and send them through a food mill, or if you must do it the hard way (I had to. There was a bit of swearing.), press them through a sieve.

When the fruit is pureed, put it back into the pot and stir in the sugar and lemon juice. Simmer this mixture on low heat until it is very thick. This took me about 1 1/2 hours. You will need to stir it often to make sure it’s not sticking. The jelly is ready when it stays in place where you’ve scraped it instead of flowing back to cover the bottom of the pot. Waters says to use an oven mitt to protect yourself from splatters, but I had no problems with this.

When your jelly is sufficiently thickened, spread it into your prepared dish and allow it to cool. When it’s completely cooled, invert it onto another piece of wax paper, remove the top layer of paper, and allow it to dry out overnight.

If your paste isn’t dry enough (again, not a problem I had), you can put it in a barely-warm oven (150 F) for an hour until it firms up, allowing it to recool before cutting.

When your jelly is ready, you can toss the pieces in coarse sugar if you like, or stash it, wrapped in plastic, for whenever you’d like a little taste of sun. Waters says it will last a year!
From Apple Jellies