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Grape Juice (Pick the grapes from their)
Pick the grapes from their stems, selecting only good ones, but do not wash them; place them over the fire until the skins burst open; strain through a colander, then through a muslin bag twice, and then through a flannel bag. To three pints of juice, add one pint of water and two cups of granulated sugar; boil well for fifteen minutes, skimming constantly. Can, or seal in bottles while boiling hot.
— Mrs. Charles Trowbridge
A straightforward Concord-grape juice, sweetened and diluted, put up by the open-kettle method. Most of what needs updating is the straining and the sealing.
- Do wash the grapesRinse and drain them; modern fruit may carry field spray residue and soil.
- "Place them over the fire"Add about a half cup of water to the bottom of the pot to keep the first grapes from scorching, then heat gently until the skins split and the pulp collapses, roughly 10 minutes at a bare simmer. Crushing the fruit with a masher first speeds this along.
- Muslin and flannel bagsThese are jelly bags. Doubled cheesecloth stands in for the muslin and a close-woven flannel or a coffee-sock for the final pass. Let the juice drip rather than squeezing if you want it clear; pressing forces through fine sediment that the flannel is meant to catch.
- The tartrate step the recipe omitsGrape juice, Concord especially, throws gritty crystals of potassium bitartrate. Refrigerating the strained juice overnight and decanting off the clear liquid before the final filtering is what gives commercial-looking juice; skip it and expect sandy sediment in the bottle.
- Fifteen minutes of boilingThat is a long time for fruit juice and it costs you the fresh grape aroma, which is volatile. Heating to about 190F and holding briefly gives the same keeping quality with far more flavor.
- Sugar and dilutionTwo cups of sugar to two quarts of finished liquid makes a sweet drinking syrup, not a modern unsweetened juice. Reduce or omit the sugar to taste; at this concentration it is not acting as a preservative -- the keeping depends on the heat treatment together with the acidity of the grapes.
- Sealing hot is no longer the standardFilling bottles with boiling juice and capping them, called open-kettle canning, relies on the sterility of the juice and the vacuum from cooling. Current practice is to fill clean hot jars, leave a quarter-inch of headspace and process in a boiling-water bath. Follow a current tested procedure for the processing time for your jar size.
- YieldThree pints of juice plus a pint of water and the sugar comes to roughly two quarts, or four pint jars. About 5 to 8 lb of grapes yields three pints of strained juice, depending on whether you press or only drip.
Unfermented grape juice as a bottled household staple is a nineteenth-century American invention, and a temperance one: Thomas Bramwell Welch, a Methodist dentist in Vineland, New Jersey, began pasteurizing Concord juice in 1869 as a communion "unfermented wine," and by the end of the century bottled grape juice had become a respectable parlor drink. The Concord grape itself was raised by Ephraim Bull in Concord, Massachusetts, and introduced in the 1850s; hardy and productive, it spread quickly, and an arbor on the side of the house was ordinary. A recipe like this one is an arbor's annual surplus being put up for winter drinking, with the flannel bag and the constant skimming aimed at a clear juice.