Grape Sauce
Remove the pulp of the grapes from the skins, boil the pulp until seeds can be separated, strain through the colander, add the skins, and boil five minutes, after which add two-thirds the amount in sugar and boil twenty minutes, stirring constantly. Concord grapes the best.
The small fruits-currants, red and black raspberries, blueberries and strawberries--are much finer cooked in the can, as this method preserves the form and flavor. Have perfectly fresh fruit; look over, fill cans full, shaking down so as to have them full, without crushing. Place the jars in a steam cooker or in a common wash-boiler in warm water, with a cloth underneath to avoid breaking, or, if at hand, a perforated tin or muffin-ring under each can. Make a syrup, allowing 1 cupful of sugar and 1 cupful water to a quart can of berries; sugar to taste. For pears and peaches use 1 cupful of sugar and 2 of water, as they will exude less juice. Let the syrup just come to a boil and pour at once into the cans. Be sure your cans are placed, as stated, in warm water, or the syrup will break them. Partly screw on the tops and let the water come to boiling-point, and boil five minutes, when small fruits will be done; large fruits will take longer. Take out cans, and if they are not full, fill to overflowing with boiling water and seal at once. Plums, cherries, currants, and strawberries will bear from 11/2 to 2 cupfuls of sugar to a cupful of water. Peaches may be successfully canned as above, but together with pears, quinces, and apples are more quickly canned by cooking in water or syrup till tender. Then lift gently into the cans, pour over them the boiling syrup, and seal. Always use Bartlett pears, as no others are so fine to can; and be sure to have them ripe. If a boiler or kettle is used to put the cans in, it is well, unless they stand very close together, to tuck a few clean white rags between them to prevent their tipping over, as there is some danger of their doing when the first two or three are taken out. Let the water come up well around the cans, but not so it will run or boil into them. Use new or very good rubbers, they are cheaper than fruit. Have tops and cans well scalded. Have fresh fruit. Be sure it is tightly sealed, testing two or three times before it is put away. Keep in a dark place; many keep it bottom-side up. Tomatoes should be scalded, skins removed, sliced, and cooked slowly thirty minutes, then sealed fast and tight, and put in the dark. If you want tomatoes to keep, have them fresh, not overripe, seal well, and keep in the dark.
The opening grape sauce is a straightforward stovetop preserve, but everything that follows it is a set of home-canning directions that no longer meet any current standard. Cook the sauce if you like it; do not follow the canning method for anything.
- Why the canning directions failFruit packed raw in jars, covered with hot syrup and boiled five minutes with the lids only partly screwed on, is not a processed pack by any modern measure — the jar contents never reach a verified temperature for a verified time. Current USDA or National Center for Home Food Preservation directions give tested processing times by jar size and altitude, and those are the only ones to use.
- The tomato instruction is the dangerous oneTomatoes cooked thirty minutes, sealed and set in the dark with no processing and no added acid is a textbook route to Clostridium botulinum. Tomatoes are a borderline-acid food, and some varieties and overripe fruit sit at or above pH 4.6, which is why every current recipe requires bottled lemon juice or citric acid added to each jar before processing. Do not can tomatoes this way.
- Rubbers and zinc topsRubbers and screw tops -- The rubber sealing rings assumed here are obsolete. Two-piece metal lids with a fresh flat every time are the only closures with a documented seal. "Test two or three times before it is put away" reflects how unreliable the old system was.
- The grape sauce itselfCooked and kept in the refrigerator, the sauce is fine. Two-thirds sugar to the amount of strained pulp (the recipe does not say whether by weight or measure) and twenty minutes at a hard stir will give a loose, spoonable sauce rather than a set jelly; it thickens noticeably as it cools.
- Slip-skin grapesThe pulp-and-skin separation only works with slip-skin varieties. Concord is named for good reason, and Niagara or Catawba behave the same way. Table grapes from a supermarket will not slip and will not give the same musky flavour.
- Seeds and the colanderA colander is coarse; a food mill fitted with the fine plate, or a sieve worked with a wooden spoon, removes seeds and the tough seed sacs far more cleanly. Concord seeds are bitter if crushed, so press gently rather than forcing pulp through.
- ScorchingGrape pulp with sugar catches quickly once it thickens. Use a wide heavy pan, keep the spoon moving across the base rather than round the sides, and drop the heat in the last five minutes.
- YieldAbout four pounds of Concords gives roughly a quart of finished sauce. It keeps two to three weeks refrigerated and freezes well in small containers.
Concord grapes were selected in Massachusetts in the mid-nineteenth century and spread fast through the northeastern states, where they ripened reliably in short seasons and grew on almost any fence line. The slip-skin structure that makes them awkward to eat is exactly what suited them to household cookery: the skins carry much of the colour and perfume, the pulp carries the acid and the seeds, and the two are easiest handled apart and then recombined \— which is precisely what this recipe does. Compendium volumes of this kind ran fruit sauces and home-canning advice together in the same breath. The canning science of the period was pre-bacteriological in practice: heat until it looks done, seal tight, keep it dark. The confident tone of the directions here conceals how little was actually understood about why sealed jars sometimes went bad.