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Spiced Grapes
Ten pounds of grapes, six pounds of sugar, two tablespoons of cinnamon, two tablespoons of allspice, one small teaspoon of ground cloves. Remove the pulps, and boil, then rub through a sieve or colander to remove the seeds; boil the skins until tender and then add to the pulp, together with the sugar, spices and vinegar. Boil until the desired consistency is obtained.
— Mrs. Zobles T. Cater
A sweet-sour spiced grape conserve of the kind that was served with meat rather than spread on toast. The method depends entirely on using slip-skin grapes, and one measurement has gone missing from the printed text.
- The missing vinegarVinegar appears in the instructions but never in the ingredient list, so the quantity is genuinely lost. Other spiced grape receipts of the period vary widely, some using as much as a pint of cider vinegar to five pounds of fruit; start low, taste as it reduces, and treat the amount as your own decision rather than the author's.
- Use slip-skin grapes"Remove the pulps" only works with Concord, Niagara, Catawba or similar American grapes, whose skins pop off under thumb pressure. Table grapes from a supermarket will not separate and the recipe collapses without that step.
- Why the two-part cookingThe pulp is boiled and sieved to strip out the seeds, while the skins are simmered separately until tender because they take far longer to soften. Combining them too early leaves you with leathery skins suspended in jam.
- Sieving the pulpPush the hot pulp through a food mill or a coarse sieve with a stiff spatula. A fine-mesh strainer will clog on the seeds and cost you a good deal of the fruit.
- Ground spices, generouslyTwo tablespoons each of cinnamon and allspice reads as a great deal, and it is; a preserve this pungent would suit cold ham, roast pork or game, though the recipe itself says nothing about serving. Ground spices also darken and thicken the mixture, so judge consistency by texture, not colour.
- "Desired consistency"Aim for the point where a spoonful dropped on a chilled plate mounds slightly and does not weep liquid. Expect a long stretch of open boiling after everything is combined; stir often, as the sugar catches easily near the end.
- Yield and keepingTen pounds of grapes with six pounds of sugar makes a large batch; plan on several pints, depending on how far you reduce it. The original gives no sealing instructions, so refrigerate what you make and use it within a few weeks; if you want shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested water-bath procedure rather than improvising from this text.
- Scaling downTen pounds is a large-batch project. Dividing everything by five gives a two-pound trial batch -- about a pound and a quarter of sugar and a generous teaspoon each of cinnamon and allspice -- which is worth doing before committing to the sieving.
Spiced grapes belong to the large family of American sweet-sour "catsups" and spiced fruits — grapes, plums, currants, peaches — that were put up in quantity each autumn to cut the monotony of cold and salted meats through winter. The slip-skin grapes this method requires are the native Vitis labrusca types, of which the Concord, generally traced to Ephraim Bull's Massachusetts vineyard in the late 1840s, became by far the most widely planted. That the receipt carries a subscriber's name is characteristic of the community cookbook: the fruit was assumed, and the spices were the personal signature.