July - When Life Gives You Apples 

                                                            An attempt at apple jelly

    The law firm where I work has a basket of fresh fruit available for snacking on each of the four floors the firm occupies.  This luxury impressed me when I went to work there.  It still does, actually.  The baskets include bananas, apples, and oranges.  The bananas are snapped up almost as soon as the basket arrives, and the oranges and apples slowly disappear from the basket throughout the rest of the week, but invariably some of the fruit is usually left over, and most of that is apples.  

    Rather than have the leftover fruit thrown away, I volunteered to take the leftovers home with me and feed them to the chickens or compost them.  Most of the time the amount is manageable, but at the beginning of July, I was handed a banker's box of leftover apples weighing a good 10 pounds or so - far too much for the chickens to eat.  Something had to be done with them.  

    I've made jams for years and apple butter forever. (Recipe for apple butter: Peel and core apples. Cook them for as long as it takes to weed the garden or watch a good movie - your choice. Spice to taste. Mash, mash, mash, mash. Put in jars.  10 minutes in a boiling water bath. Done.)   

    I thought  it was time to try my hand at apple/mint jelly, the kind that we used to put on lamb when I was a kid.  With visions of sparkling golden jelly, I grabbed the 1896 edition of the Fannie Farmer Cookbook and Blue Ribbon Preserves and set to work.

    As instructed, I quartered the apples, put them into the big canning pot, skins and all,  with enough water to almost cover them, adding the amount of sugar called for in the recipe, a bit of butter to avoid foaming, a touch of salt, a little allspice,  and a handful of the spearmint that grows on the side of the house and refuses to be stopped in its attempts to invade the yard. I let the apples  simmer until they were soft,   So far, so good.  

    When the apples were soft, I ran the mixture though the food mill to get rid of most of the solids and came up with a kind of slurry in a bowl.  Then I started straining that through cheese cloth and the jelly strainer.  I must have done that three times or so.  I was in ecstasy.  The resulting liquid was almost perfectly clear.  This was going to be great!

                                                                             Apple slurry in the bowl

    Except that it wasn't.  Well, not exactly anyway. I boiled that juice and boiled it and tested it and tested it again for jelling.  Nothing.  Well fine then, I thought, I'll just go downstairs and get that fruit pectin I bought a few months ago and add that.  In went the pectin.  I tested for jelling again.  It sluggishly crawled down a cold plate.  Based on the recipe on the pectin bag, I had to get the stuff into jars pronto, so I ladled the soupy stuff in, capped them, and processed them in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes.

    I'm quite an optimist when it comes to jams.  I hope for jam and must sometimes be satisfied with fruit syrup.   This time I was sure that the jelly would firm up and be spectacular.  It would just take a few hours, maybe overnight.  The recipe told me so.  Somebody lied.  

    There are things that cookbooks of the period don't tell you because any woman would have known about them.  I knew that fruit pectin came from apples, so I thought I had that part down.  I didn't.  I have since discovered that pectin is found in sufficient amounts to make jelly in underripe fruit and green apples.  What I had in the box were Red Delicious and Gala apples, and in addition to being rather insipid, they were anything but underripe and certainly not green.  Adding the additional pectin created an apple-flavored, slippery goop that was pretty to look at but wasn't even syrup.  It was something in between jelly and syrup that had apparently crawled out of the jam pot and into my jars.

    I didn't cry, but I was ready to bin the whole lot -  all 26 jars - until I gave Harvest a taste.  "Hmmm," she said,  "Not bad at all."  I didn't know whether to be pleased or horrified.  

    

    "Honestly," she said, "I think it will be great to sweeten my tea."  

    I thought she was mad, but I left a jar in the refrigerator, and three days later, it was gone.  My jelly disaster had become a tea sweetener.  It was far better than chucking it in the bin.  Of course, I'll never be able to create it again, nor would I want to, actually.

    Not to be deterred from my apple jelly experiment, I'm going to give it another go this fall with real apples from one of the local orchards  Apples with real flavor and, with luck, bucket loads of pectin.  The worst thing that can happen is another batch of apple syrup-ish stuff.  If that happens, I'm going to hang up my jelly bag and go back to jams.

    Canning for July was not an entire failure, though.  A couple of years back I discovered rat-tailed radish pickles at a local outdoor market.  Rat-tailed radishes are one of the untidiest plants I've ever had in my garden.  Unlike other radishes which are grown for their roots and are compact and well-behaved, rat-tailed radishes are grown for their pods.  The pods look a lot like little string beans, and they grow on a plant that looks like it's having a bad hair day.  A really bad hair day.  We planted them out in the front garden - the one people walk by - and I could only hope they didn't notice too much.    Thank the gods the plants were at the back.  It was just sort of greenish confusion back there to the viewer, I suppose.  The roses were ever so much more interesting to look at.  Nothing to see here.

    

                          Tangled rat-tailed radishes with their pods

    The Victorians probably didn't have rat-tailed radishes, but they did love their pickles, both sweet and savory, to look at the number of recipes for pickles in cookbooks of the period.  I have no doubt that these little gems would have been a smash hit with them.  Tart and savory, they are a perfect accompaniment for a hearty bread, meat, and cheese plate with olives and other pickled foods.   Like garlic scapes, which were largely ignored until the foodie set found out about them, these little darlings are sure to wind up on a Food Network show soon, and the seeds will then be impossible to get, so get 'em while you can.

    There are two varieties, one green and one purple, and I've discovered that the purple ones stay tender longer and don't go woody as quickly as the green ones which means a longer harvesting period.  Like purple beans, they turn green when they're in their jars in the boiling water bath.  When you harvest them, they should snap like fresh beans if they're just right.  There's some wiggle room with the slightly woody ones - they'll soften up in the pickling - but the really woody ones will be fibrous and hard to chew, so discard those.  The little pods are quite zippy in flavor when raw, but the pickling process mellows them out.  

    The pickles are incredibly easy to make.   If you are new to canning, they're practically bomb-proof.  No need to worry about things like mushy cucumbers.  If you have a local farmer's market, you may be able to purchase some until you can get your own tangled, delicious mess growing in your own garden.

    My own recipe is a variation of one that I found on the You Grow Girl blog.  You can vary the ingredients to suit your taste. This recipe has just a little bit of sugar in it, so if you like a sweeter pickle, add more.  I like to use ancho or pasilla chiles because they add just a little bit of heat and a lot of flavor.  You can find these at your local Mexican food store.

    Because the pods shrink during the hot water bath process, you need to pack them in as tightly as possible.  I try to stuff them into the jars like pudgy toothpicks.

This recipe makes three 1/2 pint jars.

 Ingredients:

About 1/2 pound radish seed pods (you may need more or less, depending on the size of the pods)
1 cup apple cider vinegar
1/2 cup filtered water
1 tablespoon pickling salt
1 tablespoon granulated sugar
1 dried ancho or pasilla chile, cut into small strips
Seasonings listed below

To each 1/2 pint jar add:

1 small clove garlic (I used about 1/2 teaspoon garlic scapes instead)
10 black peppercorns
1/8 teaspoon yellow mustard seed
1 bay leaf (break it into a few pieces if you're using smaller jars)
2 strips of the chile above

Choose tender, crisp, radish seed pods and pluck them individually from the plant. Avoid spongy, mature pods that have turned brownish and have full-sized seeds inside. They tend to be too difficult to chew. (Save them for replanting!) Wash and dry if necessary.

Wash three 1/2 pint jars in hot water.   Place garlic, black peppercorns, and mustard seed, bay leaf and chile strips in each hot jar and then tightly pack in the radish seed pods.

While you are packing the jars, bring the vinegar, water, salt, and sugar to a boil in a nonreactive pot. Stir to dissolve the salt and sugar.

Pour the hot brine over the radish seed pods, leaving 1/2″ headspace.  Check for air bubbles, wipe the rims clean, and seal. Process in a hot water bath for 10 minutes (adjust for elevation).

                                                              Rat-tailed radish pickles - delicious!

       And lest anyone think I may have forgotten July 4th, I thought I might offer a perspective on the freedom, or lack thereof, of American women of the Victorian age.  We tend to take for granted our power to vote.  That wasn't so for the women of the Victorian era.  Women were thought to be incapable of voting because it was said that women’s brains were inferior to men’s, so women were incapable of participating in politics, and if allowed the vote, they would neglect their homes and families causing society to unravel.   

    In 1848, the Seneca Falls Convention, the first women's rights convention, passed a resolution in favor of women's suffrage despite opposition from some of its organizers, who believed the idea was too extreme.  It would take seventy years before women got the vote.  That kind of courage and persistence is a rare thing these days.

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    In organizing protests and marches demanding the vote, many women were arrested, and some were beaten and sent to prison.  Over 200 National Women's Party supporters, the Silent Sentinels, were arrested in 1917 while picketing the White House.  Some of them went on hunger strike and endured forced feeding after being sent to prison. 

    After a hard-fought series of votes in the U.S. Congress and in state legislatures, the Nineteenth Amendment became part of the U.S. Constitution on August 18, 1920.  It states, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex."  My love and respect go out to those hundreds of women who fought for my right to vote.  

                                                                Happy 4th of July, everyone!