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Spiced Grapes
Five pounds grapes, three of sugar, two tea-spoons cinnamon and allspice, half tea-spoon cloves; pulp grapes, boil skins until tender, cook pulps and strain through a sieve, add it to the skins, put in sugar, spices and vinegar to taste; boil thoroughly and cool. -Miss Mae Stokes, Milford Center.
A classic slip-skin grape conserve of the sweet-pickle type: the skins are cooked separately so they soften, while the pulps are sieved to remove the seeds. Everything hinges on that separation.
- The grapes to useThis only works with slip-skin American grapes — Concord above all, or Catawba, Niagara, Isabella. Squeezing the stem end pops the pulp out of the skin cleanly. Seedless table grapes have no separable skin and no seeds to strain, so the whole method collapses.
- Why skins and pulp are cooked apartGrape skins stay tough long after the flesh has broken down, and they carry most of the color and tannin. Simmer them in a little water for 15–20 minutes until they are genuinely tender before recombining, or the finished pickle will be leathery.
- Straining the pulpCook the pulps 5–10 minutes until they slacken, then push them through a sieve or food mill. The seeds are hard and bitter and must all be caught; a china cap or the coarse plate of a food mill does this faster than a mesh strainer.
- Sugar by weightThree pounds of sugar to five of fruit is roughly 6 3/4 cups granulated sugar. That ratio is what makes it a sweet pickle rather than a chutney; reducing it much will give a looser, more perishable result.
- Vinegar "to taste"The original gives no quantity, which is genuinely ambiguous. Comparable spiced-fruit recipes vary widely, anywhere from about a cup to a pint of cider vinegar to five pounds of fruit; start low, add it in stages and taste, since the vinegar is meant to cut the sugar, not dominate.
- SpicesThe original reads "two tea-spoons cinnamon and allspice," which may mean two teaspoons of each or two teaspoons of the two together, plus half a teaspoon of cloves for the whole batch. Ground spices will cloud the mixture; if you prefer it clear, tie whole spices in cheesecloth and fish them out at the end.
- "Boil thoroughly"Cook uncovered at a steady simmer until the mass mounds on a spoon and a spatula drawn across the pan bottom leaves a track that closes slowly — typically 30–45 minutes. Stir often near the end, as the sugar catches easily.
- Yield and keepingExpect roughly four to five pints. The book stops at "cool" and gives no processing directions, and the acidity here is unmeasured, so treat it as a refrigerator preserve — a month cold, longer frozen — rather than sealing jars for the pantry. Serve it cold alongside pork, ham, game or cold poultry.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (Marysville, Ohio, 1877) gathered its contents from named Ohio housewives, and this entry from Miss Mae Stokes of Milford Center is typical of how the book worked: a neighbor's proportions, written down as one cook would tell another, with the vinegar left to judgment. Sweet pickles — fruit cooked with sugar, vinegar and warm spice — filled a particular slot on the nineteenth-century table, the sharp-sweet relish set beside roast and cold meats before commercial condiments were widely bought. The dish depends on the American slip-skin grape, above all the Concord, whose selection is generally credited to Ephraim Bull of Massachusetts in the middle of the century; it spread quickly through the Ohio grape country along Lake Erie and the Ohio River, and by the 1870s a farm household with a few vines had more fruit each September than it could eat fresh. Spicing and sugaring the surplus was the answer.