The housekeeper's guide to preserved meats, fruits, vegetables, &c

APPLE JELLY. — Apple jelly is a sweet generally sold in glasses. It is often eaten as a preserve, but can be used with all kinds of white meats in the same way as red-currant jelly is taken with roast mutton. It is sometimes recommended to invalids who suffer from excitable throats, but should be taken somewhat sparingly, as it is rather sickly. APPLES, BOTTLED. — Bottled apples are convenient for making apple pies when fresh apples cannot be obtained. They are already cooked, and simply want covering over with pie-crust. As a rule they will not come out whole, but settle down in the pie-dish into a pulp. The juice in the bottle should be first poured off and sweetened and added to the apples in the pie-dish. It will be found a very great improvement in making apple pies from bottled apples to add a few thin strips of lemon-peel and also a few cloves to the pie. The lemon-peel should be cut very thin, and j only the yellow part used. A goodsized pie would require two bottles of apples. To this should be added half a dozen strips of lemon the size and thickness of the thumb-nail and about ten or a dozen cloves. Bottled apples, being very soft, are very well adapted for making open apple tarts, which require apple-pulp. When you use bottled fruits for this purpose remember the pulp wants flavouring, but that the apples already are quite sufficiently cooked. Proceed, therefore, as follows: Take a bottle of apples, and pour off the juice into a small saucepan (enamel if possible). Then add to the juice from one bottle three or four strips of lemon-peel, six cloves, and a tiny little stick of cinnamon, and sweeten with sugar. Boil this gently for half an hour, and when cold add to it the apples and mash them up. Then line a shallow tart-tin, after carefully buttering it, with puff-paste. Spread the apple-pulp over it, and lay a little trellis-work of very thin strips of pastry, not bigger than a lucifer-match, over the top, and bake in the oven till the pastry is done. Half an hour, as a rule, would be sufficient. Apple trifle can be made from bottled apples. Flavour some pulp as directed for open tarts, and place in a glass dish. Four over it some cold rich custard flavoured with a little brandy. Then on the top place some good firm whipped cream, and pile it up in lumps into a sort of rough pyramid. Ornament at the last just before serving with some coarse powdered pink sugar — i.e., have some powdered sugar and sift it. Take the little rough pieces that won’t go through the sifter, and place them on a plate that has been washed over with some cochineal — i.e., some cochineal has been allowed to run over it and the plate remains wet. Shake these lumps over the plate, and the sugar will turn pink. Sprinkle the coloured sugar very sparingly over the whipped cream. This sets off the dish. Whenever bottled apples are used, and for whatever purpose, the cook should carefully, examine each piece and remove any core that 1 may remain in the apple, as very often a considerable quantity will be found. Apples bottled are also very useful for s making apple sauce for roast goose, duck, pork, etc. The pulp should be sweetened and slightly flavoured with lemon-peel and cloves.