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Green Grape Jelly
Wild grapes give the best jelly; pick the fruit just as it begins to change color. Free the grapes of stems and leaves, put them over a slow fire to heat gradually, cover the pan and shake the saucepan occasionally until the fruit boils, then let simmer about half an hour. Turn into a bag and let drain; when cool enough, loosen the contents of the bag that all the juice may drip from it; press the last of the juice from the bag, or make several "extractions" from the pulp. Measure the juice; take as many cups of sugar as cups of juice, set the sugar on agate plates into the oven, not too hot, → and stir often while it is heating. Let the juice boil twenty minutes; add the hot sugar and stir until it is dissolved. Have the jelly glasses, filled with hot water, in a pan of hot water, a folded cloth beneath them; empty the water from the glasses and ladle the hot jelly into them. Remove to a board. When cold, cover with a small round of paper, dipped in brandy, - this may be omitted, - and finish with rounds of paper that cover the top of the glass completely. Mint leaves are often cooked with the juice of green grapes to secure mint jelly. A little color paste is needed to get an attractive color.
A pre-commercial-pectin jelly that relies entirely on the acid and pectin of underripe fruit. A few of its working details need translating, and its sealing method has been superseded.
- Why underripe grapesThe instruction to pick "just as it begins to change color" is the hinge of the recipe. Green grapes are at their highest in pectin and acid; fully ripe fruit is lower in both and sets less reliably, or not at all, without added pectin. If you use cultivated table grapes, pick them hard and sour or expect syrup rather than jelly.
- Agate platesAgateware is speckled enamel over steel, the ordinary cheap kitchenware of the period. Any shallow metal pan works. The recipe specifies only "an oven not too hot" and gives no figure; the sugar is only being warmed so it will not stall the boil, and it should never brown.
- Test for the set, not the clock"Boil twenty minutes" then "stir until dissolved" gives no endpoint. Once the sugar is in, boil to 220F at sea level, or until the jelly sheets off a cold spoon in two joined drops. Underripe grapes vary enormously in juice content and this can take anywhere from five to fifteen minutes.
- Draining the bagSqueezing or pressing the bag, as the recipe permits, gives more juice but a cloudy jelly. If clarity matters, let it drip untouched and accept a smaller yield. The "several extractions" are not explained here; if it means re-covering the pulp and re-straining, the added liquid dilutes the pectin and will need a longer boil.
- Jelly glasses and sealingThe hot-water bath for the glasses is a thermal-shock precaution for thin unbanded tumblers. The brandy-dipped paper and paper covers are not a seal, only mold suppression, and neither are the paraffin discs that later replaced them. Use standard half-pint canning jars with two-piece lids and process in a boiling-water bath for 5 minutes, or refrigerate and eat within a month.
- Mint jelly noteMint contributes no pectin or acid, which is why green grape juice was used as the base. Steep the leaves in the hot juice and strain them out before the sugar goes in; boiled mint turns muddy and bitter.
- Color pastePeriod "color paste" was concentrated vegetable or coal-tar dye sold for confectionery. Modern gel food coloring does the same job; a green grape jelly is naturally a dull olive-amber.
- YieldRoughly 4 lb of grapes gives about 4 cups of juice, which with equal sugar makes something on the order of five half-pints, depending on how far it is boiled.
This belongs to the last generation of American jelly-making before packaged pectin, when the cook's only lever was the ripeness of the fruit. Wild grapes — also called frost grapes, that grew along fencerows across the eastern states — were prized precisely because they stayed acid and astringent, and picking them green pushed the pectin higher still. The trick of warming the sugar in the oven is often said to have been common practice in the period: cold sugar dropped into boiling juice halts the boil and, the reasoning went, prolonged reboiling darkens the jelly and breaks down the set. Brandy-dipped paper under the cover is older still, a survival from eighteenth-century preserving, where spirit-soaked paper was laid directly on jams and fruit butters to discourage mold in a cellar. The closing lines are the commercially interesting part: green grape juice was the neutral, high-pectin carrier for mint jelly long before anyone sold apple pectin in a box, and the frank admission that "a little color paste is needed" tells you the pretty green of this mint jelly was dyed.