Home › Jellies and Jams › Grape or Plum Jam
Grape or Plum Jam
Stew in a little water, and press the fruit through a colander or coarse sieve, adding a little water to plums to get all the pulp through; add sugar, and finish as in other jams.
A skeleton recipe that assumes you have already read the jam entries above it in the chapter. The two things it leaves unsaid are the sugar ratio and how to know when it is done.
- "Finish as in other jams"The earlier jam entries in the chapter mean adding sugar to the strained pulp and boiling it, stirring, until it thickens. Around three-quarters of a pound of sugar to each pound of pulp is the usual reckoning for grapes, and closer to equal weights suits tart plums.
- The strain is the pointBoth fruits are pushed through a sieve to leave skins and seeds behind. Grapes are easiest if you slip the pulp from the skins first, cook the pulp until the seeds loosen, sieve it, then return the skins to the pan chopped or leave them out entirely.
- Plums need the extra waterPlum pulp is thick and clings to the sieve; the splash of water the recipe calls for is there to move it through, not to thin the jam. It cooks off again in the finishing boil.
- Grape variety mattersIn 1870s Ohio this would almost certainly be slip-skin American grapes, Concord and its relatives, which are high in pectin and acid and set readily. Modern seedless table grapes are low in both and will give a syrup rather than a jam unless you add pectin and lemon juice.
- Testing the setChill a saucer in the freezer, drop a teaspoon of jam on it, wait a minute and push it with a fingertip. If it wrinkles it is done. By thermometer, 220F at sea level.
- ScorchingSieved pulp has no skins or stones to hold it off the pan bottom, so it catches fast once it thickens. Use a wide heavy pan and stir to the corners.
- Putting it upPeriod practice was to seal jars hot and store them in a cool cellar. For shelf storage now, process filled half-pint jars in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes; otherwise refrigerate and use within a month.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; as a rough guide four pounds of fruit will fill somewhere between four and seven half-pint jars, depending on how much is lost in the sieve and how far you boil it down.
Buckeye Cookery came out of Ohio in the 1870s, and its jelly and jam chapter is written for households putting up a year's fruit from their own trees and vines, not for cooks buying a punnet. That is why the entry is so terse: it sits in a run of jam recipes whose method has already been explained at length. Grapes here mean the native slip-skin sorts, Concord above all, which was selected in Massachusetts in the mid-nineteenth century and spread through the Midwest partly because it survived winters that killed European vines. The sieve is the whole technique. Concord skins are tough and the seeds are large, so straining turned an awkward fruit into something spreadable, and the same trick handled plums without the labour of pitting each one.