Recently the orphan girls made dandelion jelly. There are plenty of recipes using pectin and modern methods of such jelly, but I wanted to try and see whether or not it could be made using the core and peelings of apples as the girls in the journal did. My daughter and I picked the needed dandelions and trimmed off the yellow petals. We peeled some wilted apples that had be stored through the winter as Grandma’s had been and used the juice from both the apples and the dandelions along with lemon juice to start a nice jelly. What we learned is that the sweeter and riper the apples the less pectin you get from them, and when you have to add water to get the juice from both of these things it dilutes what pectin you might have gotten. Without that it is difficult to get jelly to be firm enough to spread. Since the orphan girls would not have been able to go to the grocery store and buy a cute little box of easy to use pectin they would have had to cook the juice and sugar until it reached the consistency of jelly. That is a long time. We did that, but we also ended up using a box of pectin for our batch as well. We were also unable to find cute jelly bottles this time of year, so we used glass punch cups and paraffin wax to seal them. This is also an older method of preserving jellies and jams.
A Cup of Jelly
The result was a very good, but sweet jelly. The apples added a pinkish golden color, and we do agree that the flavor is a little bit like honey. This is a jelly we would recommend if you have access to a lot of organic dandelions, extra time, and curiosity, but it is not the easiest jelly we have ever made. We think that if we do it again we will follow the modern pectin recipes. We like some advantages of our day over 1897, and we loved the way our little cups of jelly came out looking. We will consider doing it this way again and using them as gifts. We are considering mint jelly next because there are so many fun little tea sandwiches that can be made with mint jelly.
Cheri
