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Grape Preserves
Pick grapes from the stems, pop pulps from the skins, doing two at a time, one in each hand between the thumb and forefinger. Put pulp in a porcelain kettle and stew gently until the seeds are loosened; then strain and rub it through a sieve, weigh it with the skins, and to every pound of this allow one pound of granulated sugar. Put skins and juice in kettle, cover closely, and cook slowly until the skins are tender; while still boiling add the sugar, and move the kettle back, as it must not boil again; keep very hot for fifteen minutes, then, seeing that the sugar is thoroughly dissolved, pour the fruit in cans, and screw down the covers as soon as possible.
A slip-skin grape preserve of the old proportion: equal weights of fruit and sugar, with the skins cooked separately so they stay whole and tender. The method only works with certain grapes, and the temperature at the end matters more than the recipe lets on.
- Use slip-skin grapesThe whole technique depends on American labrusca types — Concord, Niagara, Catawba — whose pulp pops cleanly out of the skin under thumb pressure. Seedless table grapes from the supermarket are vinifera or hybrids with skins that cling, and they will not separate this way.
- Porcelain kettleThat means an enamelled cast-iron or enamel-on-steel pan, not stoneware. Any non-reactive pot works; avoid bare copper, aluminium or unlined iron, which will dull the colour of the fruit and pick up a metallic taste from the acid.
- The hinge: no boiling after the sugar goes in"Move the kettle back" means off the direct heat, to the cool side of a range. Once the sugar is in, the mixture is held very hot — just below a simmer — for fifteen minutes. The recipe gives no reason; boiling at that point would likely toughen the skins that have just been cooked tender and darken the preserve.
- WeighingThe pound-for-pound ratio is by weight of the strained pulp plus the skins, taken after the seeds have been sieved out — not the weight of the grapes you started with. Weigh after sieving, since some weight is lost to the seeds and to evaporation.
- Loosening the seedsThe pulp needs only a few minutes of gentle stewing — until it collapses and the seeds float free. Longer cooking pushes bitterness out of the seeds into the juice. Press it through a sieve fine enough to hold the seeds back, and scrape the underside of the sieve.
- SetThis is a soft preserve, not a jelly. Concord skins carry a good deal of pectin, but with no long boil after the sugar there is no gel stage here; expect whole tender skins suspended in a heavy syrup.
- Sealing"Screw down the covers as soon as possible" is open-kettle canning, which was standard in 1877 and is no longer recommended even for high-sugar fruit. Fill sterilised jars, then process in a boiling-water bath — 10 minutes for half-pints and pints at sea level, longer at altitude — rather than relying on the heat of the fruit to draw a seal.
- YieldThe original gives none.
Buckeye Cookery came out of Ohio in the 1870s, at the height of American grape enthusiasm: the Concord, raised by Ephraim Wales Bull at Concord, Massachusetts and introduced commercially in the 1850s, had put a hardy, productive, cold-tolerant grape into ordinary Midwestern dooryards within a generation. Its parent species, Vitis labrusca, has the loose skin and pulpy centre that dictate this recipe's odd two-part method — the European wine grape cannot be handled this way. Separating skins from pulp, seeding the pulp, then reuniting the two was a familiar dodge for keeping the colour and the perfume of the skin while getting rid of the seeds, and versions of it appear in a number of late nineteenth-century American preserving chapters. The instruction to screw down the covers immediately reflects the spread of the screw-band glass jar into farm kitchens after the Civil War, when sealing hot and fast was still believed sufficient on its own.