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For myself, although I do not eat apple-johns, I like to look at them. They are so shrivelled and so flat, as though a banana had caught a consumption. Or rather, in the older world was there not a custom at a death of sending fruits to support the lonesome journey? If so, the apple-john came untasted to the end. Indeed, there is a look of old Egypt about the fruit.
Tie up your whole pippens in a piece of fine cloth or muslin severally, when your sugar and water boils put them in, let them boil very fast, so fast that the syrrup always boils over them; sometimes take them off, and then set them on again, let them boil till they be clear and tender; then take off the muslin they were tied up in, and put them into glasses that will hold but one in a glass; then see if your jelly of apple-johns be boiled to jelly enough, if it be, squeeze in the juice of two lemons, and let it have a boil; then strain it through a jelly bag into the glasses your pippens were in; you must be sure that your pippens be well drained from the syrrup they were boiled in; before you put them into the glasses, you may, if you please, boil little pieces of lemon-peel in water till they be tender, and then boil them in the syrrup your pippens were boiled in; then take them out and lay them upon the pippens before the jelly is put in, and when they are cold paper them up.
Whether my fondness for gazing at apple-johns springs from a distant occasion when as a child I once bought and ate one, or whether it arises from the fact that Falstaff called Prince Hal a dried apple-john, is an unsolved question, but I like to linger before a particularly shrivelled one and wonder what its youth was like.
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