Home › Jams, Jellies and Conserves › Spiced Grape Jelly
Spiced Grape Jelly
Crush and strain the juice of grapes that are turned but not ripe. Use equal quantities of juice and sugar and to each quart add ½ teaspoon ground cloves, 1 tablespoon cinnamon. Boil rapidly 20 minutes. Put in glasses.
A four-line jelly that assumes you know how to tell when a jelly has set. The whole thing hinges on the grapes being underripe, which is where the pectin and acid come from.
- "Turned but not ripe"Grapes that have just begun to colour but are still firm and tart. They carry far more pectin and acid than fully ripe fruit, which is what makes this set without added pectin. Fully ripe grapes will give you syrup.
- Crushing and strainingCrush the grapes and strain the juice; the recipe does not say to heat them first, though gentle heating helps firm underripe fruit give up its juice. Drip through a jelly bag and do not squeeze or press it if you want clear jelly; pressed juice carries sediment and clouds the finished glass.
- Equal quantitiesRead this as equal volumes: 4 cups juice to 4 cups sugar, or a little under 2 lb of sugar to a quart of juice. The book does not say whether it means weight or volume; volume-for-volume was common in recipes of this kind and works here.
- The spice quantityA tablespoon of ground cinnamon per quart is heavy-handed and is likely to leave the jelly muddy and gritty. Bruised whole spices tied in muslin and lifted out before potting give much the same flavour with a clear set.
- Twenty minutes is a guide, not a ruleBoiling time depends on your pan and the water in the juice. Test instead: the jelly stage is 220F at sea level, or the point where the last drops sheet off a cold spoon in a single curtain rather than falling separately.
- "Put in glasses"These are jelly tumblers, which were commonly sealed with a disc of melted paraffin. Paraffin sealing is no longer recommended, as the wax shrinks and admits mould; use canning jars with two-piece lids and process in a boiling-water bath, or refrigerate and eat within a month.
- YieldA quart of juice with a quart of sugar should give several half-pint glasses, depending on how far the boil reduces it.
- How to serve itA spiced jelly of this kind is a condiment rather than a breakfast preserve. It belongs beside cold ham, roast lamb, game or a hard cheese.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg to promote its flour, and was distributed in enormous numbers to Canadian households in the years around the First World War. Its preserving chapter reflects a kitchen with no access to commercial powdered pectin, which is why the instruction to use grapes "turned but not ripe" carries the whole recipe: underripe fruit supplies both the pectin and the acid that a set requires. Spiced jellies like this one were made to be eaten with meat rather than bread, part of a long Anglo-North American habit of pairing roasts and cold cuts with a sharp sweet preserve, and they gave a use for the earliest and least palatable grapes of the harvest, whether wild riverbank varieties or the Concords widely grown in Ontario and the northeastern states.