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Grape Jelly
Pick some purple grapes, put them into a saucepan, and bruise them gently until the juice flows freely from them. Strain, without squeezing them, two or three times through thick muslin, and, when clear, boil the juice rapidly for twenty minutes. Add a pound of loaf sugar to each pound of juice, stir it until dissolved, and boil till a little put on a plate will set. Put the jelly into jars, and cover with oiled or brandied paper, and afterwards with gummed paper. Probable cost of grapes, when plentiful, 10d. or 1s. per pound. A quart of grapes should yield about one pint of juice.
A pectin-free jelly that relies on the grapes themselves for set, which makes fruit selection and the setting test the whole of the technique.
- Use slightly underripe fruitPectin and acid are highest just before full ripeness and drop away in dead-ripe grapes. A mix of ripe and just-turning fruit gives colour and enough pectin to set without commercial pectin.
- Don't squeeze the bagThe instruction to strain "without squeezing" is the hinge. Pressing the pulp forces fine sediment and tannin through and the jelly turns cloudy and slightly bitter. Let it drip, even if it takes several hours.
- Weight, not volume"A pound of sugar to each pound of juice" is a weight-for-weight ratio, so set the pan on a scale or weigh the juice before it goes in. A imperial pint of grape juice runs about 20 oz, so roughly 1 lb 4 oz sugar per pint.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined white sugar broken from a cone. Ordinary granulated white sugar is the equivalent; preserving sugar with its larger crystals dissolves with less stirring and throws less scum.
- The setting pointThe plate test still works, but a thermometer is faster: 220F/104C at sea level. Chill the plate first, and pull the pan off the heat while you test, since a rolling boil can overshoot to a rubbery set in a minute.
- The first twenty-minute boilBoiling the juice hard before sugaring drives off water so the sweetened jelly reaches setting point sooner. With modern wide pans it may take less than twenty minutes; judge by volume reduced, not the clock.
- Covering the jarsOiled or brandied paper under gummed paper was a mould barrier, not a seal, and jelly kept this way needs a cool larder and quick use. Sterilised jars with two-piece lids, filled hot and processed in a boiling water bath for ten minutes, give shelf stability; otherwise refrigerate and eat within a month.
Grape jelly in an English book of this period is a garden or hothouse product rather than a pantry staple: Britain grew a good deal of glasshouse fruit in the late nineteenth century, and gluts of dessert grapes had somewhere to go. The book quotes a price of tenpence to a shilling a pound "when plentiful," which was not cheap fruit, and the recipe reads accordingly, careful of clarity and colour in the way a confectioner would be. The method itself is the standard nineteenth-century jelly formula applied to an acid fruit, equal weights of strained juice and sugar boiled to setting point, and it works because underripe grapes carry enough pectin to set. Concentrated fruit pectin was not sold commercially until the 1910s, so the cook's only lever here was choosing the right fruit and boiling to the right degree, which is why the plate test is the standard test in preserve recipes of this date.