Home › Village Receipts › Grape Compote
Grape Compote
Six pounds of grapes after seeds have been removed, six pounds of sugar, four oranges, two pounds of raisins, one-half pound of walnut meats.
— Mrs. J. T. P. Calkins
A village-cookbook entry of the barest kind: proportions only, with the method assumed to be common knowledge. What it describes is a cooked grape conserve, sugar equal to fruit by weight, in the style of a New England-style preserve rather than anything like a French compote.
- The missing methodEqual weights of fruit and sugar, cooked down, is a common conserve formula, and the obvious reconstruction is: combine grapes, sugar, sliced oranges and raisins, bring slowly to a boil, then simmer and stir until thick. Add the walnuts towards the end of cooking. The recipe itself supplies no method and no times, so any timing here is a guess rather than the original instruction.
- Which grapesA receipt like this would most likely have used a slip-skin grape such as the Concord. The traditional handling is to slip the skins off, cook and sieve the pulp to remove seeds, then return the skins to the pot so they soften in the syrup. Seedless table grapes will work but give a flatter, less perfumed result.
- "After seeds have been removed"Weigh six pounds of prepared fruit, not six pounds at the market. Buy somewhat more than six pounds of grapes to allow for the seeds and for losses in seeding and sieving.
- The orangesFour oranges most likely means the whole fruit, thinly sliced or chopped with the peel, which supplies both pectin and a bitter edge against the sugar. Remove any seeds first; if the peel is thick, blanch the slices once to soften them.
- Sugar is structuralSix pounds of sugar to six pounds of fruit is not sweetness for its own sake, it is the preservative. Reducing it materially changes the set and the keeping quality, so treat a lower-sugar version as a refrigerator preserve.
- Knowing when it is doneGrape conserve thickens further as it cools, so stop while it still moves. A spoonful chilled on a cold plate should wrinkle when pushed; cooked past that point it turns to candy.
- Yield and storageThis makes a great deal, on the order of eight to ten pints. The original assumes jars and a cool cellar; refrigerate or freeze what you will use, and consult a current tested process if you intend to can it for the shelf, since nuts and thick preserves complicate heat penetration.
- ServingNot a dessert compote. Conserves of this type were commonly served as a sweet relish alongside roast meats, or spread on bread.
Community cookbooks are full of grape receipts for a plain reason: the Concord grape, introduced commercially in Massachusetts in the mid-nineteenth century, grew easily and produced far more fruit in September than any household could eat fresh. What could not be juiced or jellied went into conserves like this one, where sugar, citrus, dried fruit and nuts stretched the harvest into something that would keep until spring. The word "compote" here is used loosely, in the American nineteenth-century sense of fruit cooked in syrup, rather than the French sense of a lightly poached fruit dessert; the presence of raisins and walnuts marks it as what many American cookbooks of the period would likely have called a conserve. The attribution to Mrs. J. T. P. Calkins is typical of the genre, where a recipe's authority rested on the name of the neighbor who made it well.