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Canned Grapes
Canned grapes give excellent flavour, the juice resulting after standing some weeks being, if properly made, like a sweet wine. Wash and cut grapes from the bunch leaving a bit of stem on each. Make a syrup with a quart of water to each pound of sugar. Place the fruit in heated jars in an outer vessel of cold water and let heat gradually. Fill nearly full with the syrup and let cook ten minutes; add more syrup and seal immediately. (White grapes or seedless grapes are very delicate prepared this way or in grape juice.)
This is a home-canning procedure, and it is the procedure rather than the fruit that is the problem. The notes below explain the archaic language and then why the method itself has been abandoned.
- No measured processThe recipe gives ten minutes of cooking in an unspecified quantity of water at an unspecified temperature, then "seal immediately." Modern canning of grapes is done with jars fully submerged, water at a full rolling boil, for a time set by jar size and altitude. Nothing here tells you whether the contents ever reached a temperature that destroys yeasts and moulds.
- Sealing is not processingFilling the jars, topping them up with more syrup and sealing at once, with no further heating after the top-up, was common in period preserving books and is no longer considered sound. The vacuum it forms is unreliable, and any organism surviving in the headspace or on the rim has a sealed, sugared environment to work in.
- The "sweet wine" is the warningThe "sweet wine" line -- The book offers juice that tastes winey after some weeks as a mark of success. The phrase may be describing flavour rather than reporting fermentation, but if juice is genuinely fermenting inside a sealed jar it means live yeast, gas pressure, and the possibility of a lid letting go. Modern practice regards a fermenting jar of fruit as spoiled.
- Grapes are acid, so this is a spoilage problem, not botulismGrapes sit around pH 3.0-3.5, low enough that Clostridium botulinum is not the concern. The realistic failures are surface mould, yeast fermentation, and the mycotoxins some moulds leave behind in acid fruit. If you want canned grapes, use a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority.
- The syrup ratio is ambiguous"A quart of water to each pound of sugar" gives a very thin syrup by any standard, and the text never says how much syrup per pound of fruit. Some period books give a pound of sugar to a pint of water for a medium syrup, so this line may be a printer's inversion. It cannot be resolved from the page.
- "An outer vessel of cold water"This is a water bath, and the cold start is there to keep the glass of the era from cracking. Jars of that period sealed with a glass or zinc lid and a rubber ring, which is why the instruction reads "seal immediately" rather than "apply the lid fingertip tight" — modern two-piece lids vent during processing and seal as they cool.
- The bit of stemLeaving a short stub of stem on each grape is sound practice for keeping the skins intact and the syrup clear; it is the one detail here worth carrying over to any modern method.
Grapes reached American preserving books by two routes: the native Vitis labrusca types, of which the Concord — introduced in Massachusetts in the mid-nineteenth century and generally credited to Ephraim Bull — became the commercial standard, and the thin-skinned white and seedless European grapes the recipe singles out as "very delicate." The book's approving note that the juice turns "like a sweet wine" is itself a period artifact: canned fruit and bottled juice were domestic rivals to wine at a time when temperance sentiment was strong, and the commercial pasteurised grape juice trade begun by the Welch family in the 1860s was built explicitly on juice that would not ferment. That a household writer could recommend accidental fermentation as a feature shows how loosely the line between preserve and beverage was still drawn in the home kitchen.