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Grape Jelly
Remove the grapes from the stems, put over a slow fire in an agate or white-lined saucepan, and let simmer very gently, until the fruit is softened throughout; then pour into a bag and drain off all juice possible. Take one cup of sugar for each cup of juice; heat the sugar, spread on shallow dishes, in the oven; meanwhile heat the juice to the boiling point and let boil rapidly about five minutes, skimming as needed; add the sugar and let boil until a little will jelly on a cold saucer or from the tip of the spoon. Have ready jelly glasses on a folded cloth and surrounded with water heated nearly to the boiling point. The glasses should also contain hot water. When the jelly is done, pour the water from the glasses, fill with jelly, and remove from the pan of water. When cold, cover with paper.
A pectin-free jelly that depends entirely on the grapes themselves, so the fruit you choose matters more than anything you do to it. Two points below deserve attention before you start: use slightly underripe fruit, and do not trust paper as a seal.
- Choose the grapes for pectinConcord or another slip-skin American grape works best, and about a quarter of the fruit should be underripe and still firm. Fully ripe grapes have lost much of their pectin and acid, and the jelly will stay syrupy no matter how long you boil it.
- "Agate or white-lined"Agate is speckled enameled steel; white-lined means enamel over iron. Both were specified because grape tannins and acid react with bare iron and copper, darkening the juice and dulling the flavor. Stainless steel or enameled cast iron does the same job.
- Heating the sugarSpread it in shallow dishes in a low oven and warm it through, stirring once; the recipe gives no temperature. Warm sugar dissolves without dropping the juice off the boil, which shortens the cooking and keeps the color bright. Do not let it color.
- Draining the bagLet it hang undisturbed. Squeezing or pressing forces pulp and fine sediment through and gives cloudy jelly. Expect roughly 3 to 4 cups of juice from 4 lb of grapes.
- Tartrate crystalsGrape juice throws gritty crystals of potassium bitartrate on standing. Chilling the strained juice overnight and pouring it off the sediment before you cook it prevents the crystals turning up in the finished glasses.
- The jelly point, by numberThe cold-saucer test works, but a thermometer is faster: 220F at sea level, or 8F above the temperature at which water boils in your kitchen. The spoon test the recipe describes is the sheet test, where the last drops run together and fall in a curtain rather than singly.
- Small batchesCook no more than about 6 cups of juice at once. A deep, crowded pan needs long boiling, and long boiling breaks pectin down; the result is a dark, thin jelly.
- SealingThe hot-water bath around the glasses is chiefly there to keep them from cracking when the boiling jelly goes in; it is not a seal. A paper cover was not a seal either, and jars finished this way can grow surface mold in a warm cupboard. Fill sterilized half-pint canning jars, leave a quarter inch of headspace, and process in a boiling water bath according to current guidance, or refrigerate and eat within a month.
- YieldRoughly 4 lb of grapes gives 3 to 4 half-pint glasses.
Grape jelly reads as an American staple, and the fruit behind it was itself a fairly recent arrival: the slip-skin Concord grape, generally credited to Ephraim Bull of Concord, Massachusetts, in the middle of the nineteenth century. High acid and firm skins made such grapes ideal for jelly, and a cook's insurance was underripe fruit and a short, hard boil. The elaborate business of surrounding thin jelly glasses with near-boiling water is a reminder of how fragile household glassware was before the thicker glass of Mason-type canning jars became universal, and the paper cover shows the same period logic: jelly was understood to keep by its sugar and acid alone, with the covering there mainly to keep out dust.