Red Hots
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| photo: Eric Diesel |
If there is any recipe I get asked about, it's red hots.
People who've eaten them when I've served them ask, home-canners at demos ask,
readers scavenging beloved memories ask. Red hots are now something of a
novelty, but once they were as much a staple of fall canning as pumpkin butter
or cranberry sauce. Apples, though plentiful year long, are in high season in
autumn. Canning apples attunes us to the rhythm of autumn by preserving its signature
sweetness against winter austerity.
Red hots are chunks of sweet apple candied in a bright red,
sweet-hot syrup. They are a blue-ribbon specialty among home-canners in the way
mincemeat is: they reflect locality and homesteading. You find recipes for red
hots, often competing, in community cookbooks. They are so common in the Middle
Atlantic and New England that you find commercial versions on grocery store
shelves just as matter-of-factly as you find scrapple and clam broth. Their
origin seems to be Pennsylvania Dutch cooking, perhaps as an evolution of the
old country practice of placing a compote of stewed fruit on the sideboard
during meals. Red hots also have the air of the wartime kitchen about them.
They are as bright red as patriotic stripes, and everyone knows that apples are as American as pie. Making red hots can be a community effort (in fact, it
helps), and that combined with their old-fashioned quality evokes the Victory
Kitchens of the homefront.
The American Table is democratic through diversity. Cooks
remember and honor the kitchens of the old country, including the Americas before settlement. Cooking and serving traditional dishes was, and is, a way of
preserving -- in the case of red hots, literally -- cultural and familial traditions
and history. Sharing cultural identity was seen as a contribution to the
broader American experience. Culture was both familial and community-based, and
was informed by markers of cultural identification -- for example, food -- in a
way we have, to a great extent, now homogenized out of existence.
My father grew up as first generation German in a pocket of
Chicago where there was safety in numbers for that, especially relevant during
WWII. His mother was Swiss. From her kitchen and, tellingly, that of her
daughters came food that was as much a reassurance of cultural identity as a
continuance of it. Family spreads displayed German-Swiss cooking that was
disorienting, to say the least, to a boy who was used to farmhouse cooking back
home. Potato salad was vinegary and crowned with bacon. There were boards of
wurst from sturdy brats to paste-like braunschweiger, served with thick brown
mustard and bewildering black bread. There was sauerkraut, crawling with rye
seeds, acrid to taste and to smell. But there was a big crock of red hots, and
those sweet apples, candied in that hot, neon-red syrup, awakened my taste buds
in the way that wine was destined to later in life.
When I went to Pennsylvania for college, I fell upon red
hots as a memory uncovered. In Williamsport, red hots were ubiquitous. Every
church bazaar featured them, hot red "chust for pretty," in towers of
pint jars, alongside the military green of green beans and the muted gold of
corn. Our beloved Nana made red hots, along with her famous fahr'nice and more
of that sinister sauerkraut. Nana's red hots were spicy, sweet, and syrupy,
served as a treat after supper on a bleak Pennsylvania evening or over vanilla
ice cream at a summertime family picnic. I remember my surprise that the heat came from cinnamon candy, and some disappointment that the red came from plain
old food coloring.
I put up red hots as autumn turns from harvest gold to
wheaten brown. I serve them as part of the Thanksgiving relish tray, where
during all of those Thanksgivings we hosted in New York City they were as
popular, I think, as the turkey and the cranberry sauce. I place well-sealed
jars of red hots into holiday parcels, where, if they arrive in a household
that still celebrates the old ways, they will be part of the traditional New Year's Eve board of "seven sweets and seven sours." And I always save
some for our own pantry, to set on the table during a mid-winter meal of
roasted chicken or pork roast. But they really are their best in and of
themselves: sticky and sweet, red and hot.
Red-Hots
It is essential to follow safe canning practices.
For instructions on safe canning, click here: http://www.uga.edu/nchfp/publications/publications_usda.html
or here http://www.freshpreserving.com/getting-started.aspx.
This recipe should yield about 8 pint jars.
25 medium-sized firm red apples, such as Golden Delicious or Roma
1-1/2 cups granulated sugar
3/4 cup cinnamon imperials (click here)
2/3 cup light corn syrup
1-1/2 cups white vinegar
2 cups water
2 tablespoons red liquid food coloring (click
here)
3 teaspoons ground cinnamon
2 teaspoons ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
3 whole star anise
1 lemon
Prepare the apples
- Fill a large bowl 1/2 with water. Slice the lemon in half crossways and squeeze one of the halves through a sieve into the water.
- Working one at a time, peel, core, and cut each apple and add the pieces to the lemon water as you go:
- Use a peeler to remove all of the red skin. Safely cut the apple in half lengthways from stem to blossom end. Carefully cut away the stem, core and seeds, and any skin exposed after cutting lengthways. Cut each peeled, stemmed, and cored apple half into 4 lengthwise slices.
- Once all of the apples are prepared, lightly stir them in the water. Carefully pour the apples into a large colander to drain thoroughly while you make the syrup.
Note: It is essential when making candy syrup to
follow safe practices: work slowly and gently, without distractions, to
minimize the danger of splashing.
- Place a large steel pot on the stovetop.
- Measure the sugar, candy, cinnamon, and ginger into the pot; whisk together to combine. Add the corn syrup, vinegar, water and food coloring to the pot. Whisk all of the ingredients together to form a thick, bright red liquid. Add the star anise and the cloves to the syrup mixture.
- Turn the heat to medium-high. Safely stir the syrup with the whisk until the syrup reaches full boil and the candies have melted, approximately 10 minutes. Stir gently to avoid splashing.
- Once the syrup reaches full boil, reduce heat to low.
- Give the apples in the colander a shake (not over the hot syrup!) to express excess water. Carefully use a slotted spoon to transfer the apples into the hot syrup, stirring gently after each addition until you have used all of the apples. Cook the apples in the syrup for 5 minutes.
- Turn off the heat and cover the pot while you prepare the jars. If the mixture is too thick once you are ready to fill the jars, reheat over low until the mixture is workable
- Place a clean towel on a counter near the canner.
- Use canning tongs to remove hot jars from water bath. Do your best not to touch the hot jars; let the tongs do the work. Place hot jars mouth up on the clean towel.
- Use a jar lifter to transport a jar mouth-side up to the pot containing the hot apple-syrup mixture. Place a clean canning funnel into the mouth of the jar. Carefully use a large spoon to fill the jar with fruit and syrup to the ½-inch mark.
- Once all of the jars are filled with fruit, carefully top off with syrup to the 1/2-inch mark if warranted.
- Check for and remove air bubbles if any.
- Use a clean, damp sponge to wipe the rim of each jar. Center a clean, hot lid on each jar. Screw a band down on each jar until it meets resistance; increase just until tight.
- Use canning tongs to return the jars to the boiling water bath. Add more water if necessary to ensure that the jars are completely covered by boiling water by 1 inch. Process in boiling water bath for 10 minutes.
- After jars have processed for ten minutes in the boiling water bath, turn off the heat. Remove the canner lid and set aside. Let jars sit in hot water ten minutes.
- After ten minutes, use the canning tongs to remove the jars. Being very careful of the hot jars, lids and liquid, place jars upright on the towel. Allow to sit 24 hours.
- After 24 hours, check for a vacuum seal (see instructions).Label each jar with the contents and the date prepared.
- Safely prepared, stored and sealed, Red Hots will keep for one year from date of preparation.
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