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Grape Juice (Wash Concord grapes thoroughly)
Wash Concord grapes thoroughly, using cold water; then weigh them, and, allowing one pint of water to every five pounds of grapes, boil until the pulps and skins have separated and boiled down. Make a bag of double cheese-cloth, large enough to hold the quantity of juice that would fill a small bread pan; tie the top tightly with a stout cord, and suspend it from a strong nail, or hook, in such a position that the juice may drip into the pan. As it requires about fourteen hours for so much juice to drip, it is best to start it in the evening, for in that way it can drip all night and be ready for boiling next morning. Add one pound of sugar to every five pounds of grapes, boil for about two minutes, bottle, cork and seal with paraffin.
— Mrs. E. S. Root
The extraction method here is sound and still worth reading, but the preservation step is not: the juice is boiled two minutes, poured into bottles, corked and capped with wax, with no processing afterward and no attention to the sterility of the containers. That is why this cannot be followed as printed.
- The paraffin seal is the failure pointA disc of melted wax over a cork does not exclude air or microorganisms. Paraffin shrinks and pulls away from the glass as it cools, leaving channels; it was abandoned for all home preserving decades ago, jelly included.
- No measured heat processTwo minutes at a rolling boil kills spoilage yeasts and molds in the pot, but the recipe gives no bottle sterilization, no fill temperature, no headspace and no hold in a water bath. Anything living on the inside of the bottle or the cork survives into storage.
- What goes wrong in practiceUnprocessed sealed grape juice ferments. Wild yeasts on the fruit and in the bottle restart on the added sugar, building carbon dioxide pressure behind a corked and waxed neck, and surface molds grow under a broken seal. Use a current tested recipe for canned grape juice.
- Fourteen hours at room temperatureSuspending a cheesecloth bag of warm sweet pulp overnight in a warm kitchen is a deliberate incubation. Even if the juice is later boiled, the practice belongs to a period before household refrigeration was general.
- On the proportions, for readingOne pint of water to five pounds of grapes and one pound of sugar to five pounds of grapes is a ratio in line with other recipes of the period. The recipe does not state a yield, and the amount of juice five pounds of Concords will give by this drip method varies; by modern taste the sugar is heavy.
- Concord grapes and tartrateConcord is a slip-skin American grape, which is why the skins and pulp separate so readily under heat. Juice made from it throws gritty potassium bitartrate crystals on standing; a common remedy is to let the strained juice settle cold and rack it off the sediment before the final boil.
- The bag matters more than the wringingThe one instruction here that is still good technique is to let the bag drip untouched. Squeezing it forces fine pulp and skin tannin through the cloth and gives cloudy, astringent juice.
The Concord grape itself is well documented: it was selected by Ephraim Wales Bull in Concord, Massachusetts, and introduced commercially in the mid-1850s, and its hardiness made it a common dooryard grape of the Northeast. Unfermented grape juice as a household staple is generally traced to Thomas Bramwell Welch, a New Jersey dentist and Methodist who in 1869 applied Pasteur's heating method to Concord juice so that his congregation could take communion without wine; the temperance movement carried the idea into ordinary kitchens, where it was drunk as a tonic for invalids as much as a beverage. Recipes like this one sit at the awkward point where the technique had spread faster than the understanding behind it: the boiling was copied but not the sealed, held pasteurization that actually made it keep, and paraffin over a cork was a common, and unreliable, answer to airtightness.