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Grapes Preserved with Honey
Take seven pounds of sound grapes on the stems, the branches as perfect as possible, and pack them away snugly, without breaking, in a stone jar. Make a syrup of four pounds of honey and one pint of good vinegar, with cloves and cinnamon to suit, (about three ounces of each is the rule). Boil them well together for twenty minutes, and skim well, then turn boilinghot water over the grapes and seal immediately. They will keep for years, if you wish. Apples, peaches and plums may be done in this way.
This is an open-kettle sweet pickle of the sort that filled nineteenth-century stone crocks, and it cannot be reproduced safely by modern preserving standards. The notes below explain where it breaks down rather than how to fix it.
- No processing at allThe fruit is never heated. Cold raw grapes go into the jar, hot liquid is poured over, and the jar is sealed immediately. Nothing in the procedure brings the contents of the jar to a temperature that destroys yeasts, moulds or bacterial spores, and there is no boiling-water bath afterwards. This is the open-kettle method, abandoned by every current preserving authority.
- The acidity is unknown and probably too lowOne pint of vinegar of unstated strength, cut with four pounds of honey, is poured over seven pounds of whole grapes that will release their own water. Safe pickling depends on a measured final pH at or below 4.6 throughout the jar. Nothing here fixes that figure, and whole unbroken grapes on the stem will not let the acid penetrate evenly.
- "Boiling hot water"The text says to pour boiling hot water over the grapes, not the syrup that was just made and skimmed. Whether this is a printer's slip for "syrup" is impossible to know, but as printed it dilutes the preserve to nothing and removes what little acid protection the vinegar offered.
- A stone jar is not a sealable vesselA glazed stoneware crock "sealed immediately" in a recipe of this period would have meant a cloth-and-wax or bladder closure, sometimes a tied paper lid. None of these gives the hermetic vacuum seal a modern two-piece lid provides, and old lead-bearing glazes are a separate hazard with an acidic syrup standing in them for years.
- "They will keep for years"This claim rests on sugar concentration and vinegar alone. Honey is roughly 17 percent water, and diluted with fruit juice it falls well below the sugar level that inhibits microbial growth. Mould on the surface of such a crock also raises the pH locally, which is the classic route to spoilage in low-acid pockets of a sweet pickle.
- Three ounces each of cloves and cinnamonSix ounces of whole spice for seven pounds of fruit is enormous by modern taste, and "three ounces of each is the rule" suggests whole spices meant to be strained or left loose in the crock. Ground spice at that weight would be inedible. It is worth reading as evidence of how heavily spiced Victorian sweet pickles were, not as a working quantity.
- If you want the dishSpiced pickled grapes are still made, and a current tested recipe from a food-preservation extension service will give the vinegar strength, headspace and processing time this one lacks.
Sweet spiced fruit put up in vinegar and sugar sits between the preserve and the pickle, and was a fixture of American and British larders throughout the nineteenth century, served in small quantities alongside cold meat and game rather than eaten as a jam. Honey here is doing the work sugar usually did, though why this recipe reaches for it rather than refined sugar the text does not say. The instruction to keep the grapes on their stems "as perfect as possible" is often read as a matter of presentation, since whole bunches lifted from the crock would make a handsome garnish for a platter. The closing line, that apples, peaches and plums may be done the same way, is characteristic of the genre, where a single method was expected to be carried across whatever the orchard produced that year. Recipes of this kind persisted in print well past the point at which the science of home canning had moved on, which is why collections like this one still print open-kettle instructions that a modern extension bulletin would reject outright.