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Grape Sweetmeat
Eight pounds of grapes, four pounds of sugar, two oranges (use peel and pulp, sliced), one and one half pounds of raisins, stoned. Pulp grapes, cook until soft, strain out seeds, add skins and cook fifteen minutes. Add sugar, orange, and raisins. Boil until as thick as marmalade.
This is what a later cookbook would call a grape conserve: a slip-skin grape marmalade carrying orange and raisins. The method hinges on separating skins from pulp, and the recipe assumes you know why.
- Use slip-skin grapesThe instruction to "pulp grapes" only works with American varieties such as Concord, Catawba or Niagara, whose skins slip off the pulp under thumb pressure. European table grapes will not separate this way and the recipe collapses without that step.
- How the pulping worksSqueeze the pulp out of each grape into one pan and reserve the skins in another. Cook the pulp until soft, press it through a sieve to remove the seeds, then return it to the skins. The skins need the fifteen minutes of cooking to soften; they carry most of the colour and all of the texture.
- "Stoned" raisinsRaisins of the period were commonly sold with their seeds in, to be stoned by hand, though ready-seeded raisins could also be bought. Any modern seedless raisin is already what the recipe wants; chop them coarsely so they distribute.
- The orangesPeel and pulp sliced means the whole fruit, thin-sliced and seeds discarded. Slice as finely as you can manage, as the peel will not soften much once the sugar goes in. The recipe asks simply for two oranges; use two of average size.
- Sugar is low by preserve standardsSugar is lowish by preserve standards -- Four pounds of sugar to eight of grapes plus a pound and a half of raisins is a little over forty per cent sugar by weight, below the proportion usual in a long-keeping preserve, though the raisins bring sugar of their own. Expect a darker colour and less keeping power than a standard jam.
- Judging "thick as marmalade"Cook uncovered, stirring often once the sugar is in, until a spoonful chilled on a cold plate holds a furrow and no watery ring seeps out. Grapes bring their own pectin from the skins, so no added pectin is required, though the mixture scorches easily at the end.
- YieldRoughly ten to twelve half-pint jars, depending on how far you reduce it.
- StorageThe book gives no processing directions here, which was normal for open-kettle preserving. Follow a current tested procedure for water-bath processing and headspace, or simply refrigerate the filled jars and use them within a few weeks.
"Sweetmeat" was once a broad term for anything preserved in sugar, from candied peel to a thick fruit paste, and it is often said to have lingered in American preserving vocabulary after English cooks had shifted to jam, marmalade and conserve. This particular formula belongs to a large family of Concord grape conserves that spread through American household books in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, once the Concord grape, introduced commercially in the mid-1850s, became the cheap and abundant autumn fruit of the Northeast. The orange and raisins mark it as a conserve in the American sense: a marmalade enriched with dried fruit and citrus, generally thought of as a relish for the tea table or for cold meat rather than something spread thin on breakfast toast. Recipes of this kind also solved a practical problem, since grapes arrived all at once in quantity and seeds and tough skins made them awkward to preserve whole.