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Grape and Elderberry Jelly
Use half and half of green grapes and elderberries and proceed as for the usual form of jelly-making.
This is less a recipe than a note filed under grapes, on the assumption that the reader already knows how to make jelly. The proportions are the whole of the instruction, so the method has to be supplied.
- Why green grapes"Green grapes" here most likely means unripe ones. Elderberries are low in both pectin and acid and set poorly on their own; hard green grapes carry plenty of both, which would account for the pairing.
- Strip the stemsElderberry stems, leaves and green unripe fruit contain cyanogenic compounds and are not wanted in the pot. Comb the berries off the umbels with a fork and discard every bit of the green stalk before cooking.
- The usual form of jelly-makingCrush the fruit, barely cover with water, simmer 20-30 minutes until slack, then drip through a jelly bag without squeezing. Measure the juice, boil it hard, and add three-quarters to one cup of sugar per cup of juice.
- Judging the setBoil to 220F (104C) at sea level, or until the syrup sheets off a cold spoon in a single curtain rather than dripping. Green-grape juice sets briskly, so start testing early to avoid a stiff, gummy jelly.
- Cook the fruit, alwaysRaw elderberry juice causes nausea in some people. The long simmer and the hard boil with sugar both drive that off; there is no version of this that should be eaten uncooked.
- Quantities and yieldAbout 4 lb of fruit total, half and half by weight, gives roughly 4-5 cups of juice and something on the order of five or six half-pint jars. Pour into hot sterilised jars and process in a boiling-water bath for 10 minutes; the recipe itself gives no sealing instruction.
- Colour and flavourExpect a deep purple-black jelly with an earthy, musky edge quite unlike grape jelly alone. A little lemon juice sharpens it if the grapes were riper than intended.
Elderberry jelly appears in American household books throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries because the elder was a hedgerow and fencerow plant rather than a crop: Sambucus canadensis grew unbidden along field edges across the eastern states, and its fruit cost nothing but the picking. The difficulty was always that elderberry juice is sweet, flat and short on pectin, so it was often said to want something acid and firm alongside it. Pairing it with green grapes may well have been a thrifty solution, though the recipe itself says nothing of where the grapes came from. This kind of one-line entry, slotted into a chapter on a single fruit, assumes a reader who has made jelly since girlhood and needs only the proportions; the jelly bag, the drip overnight and the test on a cold spoon went without saying.