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Grapes, Pickled
Pick the grapes from the stalks. Reject any that are unsound, and put them into a deep jar with as much white-wine vinegar as will amply cover them. Tie them down with a bladder, and keep them in a cool, dry place. They will be ready for use in a month. Probable cost of grapes, when plentiful, 10d. to 1s. per pound.
A cold-pack pickle of the simplest kind: sound fruit, enough vinegar to cover, and a month of patience. Almost everything worth saying concerns the vessel and the vinegar.
- The hinge: fruit fully submergedAny grape that floats above the vinegar will spoil and take the jar with it. Weight the fruit down with a small plate, a fermentation weight, or a plastic bag of brine so nothing breaks the surface.
- Bladder means an airtight sealA wetted pig's bladder was tied over the jar mouth and shrank tight as it dried. A glass jar with a plastic or plastic-lined lid does the same job; avoid bare metal, which vinegar corrodes.
- Vinegar strengthUse white wine vinegar of at least 5 per cent acidity, which is standard for commercial bottles. Nineteenth-century vinegar was not standardised and its strength varied, so the original's confidence about a cool cupboard rested on a less predictable product than what is sold now.
- Keep it cold"A cool, dry place" would have meant an unheated larder or cellar rather than a modern kitchen cupboard. Without that, keep the jar in the refrigerator for the curing month and afterwards; the pickle is acidified but not heat-processed or hermetically sealed.
- Choosing and preparing the grapesFirm, slightly underripe grapes hold their shape; anything soft or split will collapse into mush. The original has you pick the grapes clean off the stalks; prick each one once with a needle so the vinegar penetrates evenly.
- Non-reactive jarGlass or glazed stoneware only. Vinegar will pull metal out of aluminium, copper or unlined tin and taste of it.
- Yield and servingA pound of grapes roughly fills a quart jar, needing about 1 to 2 cups of vinegar to cover amply. Serve them as a sharp relish with cold game, ham, terrines or hard cheese, in the same place you would use pickled walnuts.
- The price note10d. to 1s. per pound was the Victorian retail price when grapes were in season, given so a cook could judge whether it was worth pickling that week. It carries no instruction for the modern reader.
Cassell's places this among the plain preserving entries that every large Victorian kitchen needed. Pickling fruit in vinegar for the meat course is much older than the book: pickled walnuts, damsons, barberries and mushrooms all sat on the same sideboard, supplying acidity in an era before lemons were cheap year round and before refrigeration let you keep fresh fruit into winter. The bladder tie is the era's ordinary seal, used for jams, potted meats and pickles alike, and its disappearance from kitchens is a fair marker of how thoroughly the screw-top glass jar replaced improvised closures. The price note at the end is a standing feature of Cassell's entries, aimed at the housekeeper costing a week's table rather than at the cook at the bench.