Apple Mint Jelly Yet Again: The Ratios with Fresh Apples

Making jam or jelly is always an exercise in math if you're not following a recipe precisely. For apple mint jelly the question becomes whether I have enough mint on hand to flavor a given quantity of apples. This set of instructions helps you calculate proportions based on what you have.

X = Cups of mint leaves and stems, chopped (yes, you can use the stems, which also carry the minty goodness; I leave out ones that are very thick and woody)

2X = Pounds of apples, quartered, not cored or peeled because you want to keep the pectin, and including any skins or cores you have from other appley goodness you're working on to provide extra pectin, although it can't be all skins/cores because then you won't have apple flesh to extract juice and flavor from

2X = Cups of liquid: Water, or half water and half white vinegar

If this fills an entire stockpot, split it into two so the cooking goes more efficiently.

Bring apples, liquid and mint to a boil, then reduce to a simmer. Cook until apples turn to a soft mush, approximately 20 minutes. Mash it all up a bit with a potato masher

Set the apples and liquid to drain in a jelly strainer set-up or a sieve lined with cheesecloth set over a big bowl. Do not press on the solids. When you do that you end up with cloudy jelly because you pushed some solids into the juice. Let the mash sit for several hours or overnight to get every possible drop with the help of gravity.

Your labors and time yield a given amount of juice. Some recipes will tell you to add water to get to a specific number of cups. Why on why would you dilute the delicious juice you just made? Don't do that.

Your final math problems: 

• For each cup of juice, add 7/8 cup of white sugar. This is 3/4 of a cup plus 2 tablespoons.
• For each 2 cups of juice, add 2 T. lemon juice 

You can figure out smaller proportions where you fall short of a full cup or you can accept that cooking is improv, start with a baseline that rounds down rather than up because you can't unsugar something, and taste the juice at some point as it cooks.

I did this the other day and ended up with 6 cups of minty apple juice. That yielded 3 half-pints, 9 quarter-pints of jelly. 

I probably skimmed off another quarter-pint of foam from the top to create nice clear jelly. That foam doesn't go to waste at our house; I put it in a little jar that goes in the fridge to be eaten as scrap jelly. It tastes good; it's just not ready for its close-up.

Related reading

• Apple Hot Pepper Jelly Recipe
• Apple Mint Jelly, No Pectin Needed (made with commercial apple cider)
• Spiced Apple Butter Recipe
• My Circular Economy of Apples
• Blackberry Apple Chutney Recipe
• Apples, Apples, Apples!
• Canstravaganza 2025
• Canstravaganza 2024

Poetry and Place

A story with a happy ending, brought to me by poetry:

I had the great good fortune to go on a family trip to England last year, with a stop in Wales. In a bookstore in Caernarvon I picked up a book of poetry, This Common Uncommon by Rae Howells. 

She's following in the footsteps of an earlier Welsh poet, John Clare, who wrote about the effects of the Enclosure Act. Howells' poems describe Clyne Common in loving detail, from the plants and creatures to the people fighting to save it from development. Wales has a national law protecting spaces that hold endangered species and they're trying to preserve their commons, but this one was owned by an English lord who wanted to develop it.

I read the book over the course of a few weeks, resisting the urge to find out what actually happened in the legal battle. I finished the book, read the beautiful last poem "Jays in Love", and promptly searched on "Clyne Commons legal battle."

They won! They saved the commons! Many, many people fought to save it and won.

It isn't that this book of poetry necessarily turned the tide. But it brought me so much joy to know that this place she observed so closely and described so beautifully is still there. The scrubby land the lord had offered up as "replacement value" is a perfectly good place to put houses, since housing is a real need. You can build houses without destroying irreplaceable habitat. And the people who live in those houses can enjoy and appreciate the commons that will still be there, living and breathing. 

Reading the first lines of that article moved me to tears. People loving a place and caring and fighting for it can and do make a real difference in the world.

This story of place has extra resonance for me because my maternal grandfather was of Welsh descent, although I have no idea which part of Wales his family originally came from. Welsh mythology has always appealed to me, and in college as a linguistics major I took a semester of Middle Welsh. Going to Wales meant riding on a train that announced stops first in Welsh, then in English, and hearing Welsh spoken as the primary language in the bookstore where I got this book and a new translation of the Mabinogion, the Welsh mythology I read as a child.

I want more poetry of place. If it's coupled with a victory for the planet, so much the better. Know of any?