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Grape Butter
Simmer the pulp of grapes (either green or ripe) till tender; put through a colander, then add skins and cook till tender, when the sugar must be stirred in, allowing one-half pound to each pound of fruit. Cook till thick and seal.
A slip-skin grape recipe: the method assumes American grapes such as Concord or Catawba, whose skins pop free of the pulp under thumb pressure. It works with almost no equipment, but the sealing instruction is the part that has moved on.
- Which grapesThe two-stage cooking only makes sense with slip-skin varieties (Concord, Niagara, Catawba), where the jelly-like pulp separates cleanly from the tough skin. Seedless table grapes have thin, tender skins and can simply be cooked whole and sieved.
- Reading the methodPulp and seeds go into the pan first, are cooked soft, then pushed through a colander or sieve to strain out the seeds. The skins are then added to the strained pulp and cooked until tender; that is what gives grape butter its colour and body.
- Sugar by weight, not volume"One-half pound to each pound of fruit" is a weight ratio; the recipe does not say whether the pound is the raw grapes or the cooked, seeded pulp, so either reading is defensible. Half a pound of sugar is roughly 1 cup. Add it only after the skins are soft — sugar added early is generally held to toughen skins and slow their breakdown.
- Green grapesUnderripe grapes are more acidic and somewhat higher in pectin, so the butter may set sooner and will taste sharper. Expect to stop cooking earlier and consider a little extra sugar.
- "Cook till thick"Fruit butter is done when a spoonful dropped on a cold plate holds its shape without a rim of liquid weeping out, or when a spoon drawn across the pan bottom leaves a track. Use a wide pan, stir often near the end, and use a flame tamer if your burner runs hot — the sugar scorches quickly once the mixture mounds.
- SealingIn a book of this period "seal" might mean a hot jar closed with wax or paraffin, or a screw-top or wire-bail jar; the recipe does not say which. Current practice is to ladle the butter boiling hot into clean half-pint or pint jars, leaving 1/4 inch headspace, and process in a boiling-water bath — about 10 minutes for half-pints, adjusted for altitude. Paraffin seals are no longer considered reliable against mould.
- YieldDepends on how far you reduce it; the recipe sets no quantity. Refrigerate anything unprocessed and use it up within a couple of weeks.
- SeasoningSome period recipes for fruit butter add a stick of cinnamon or a few cloves to the pan while the butter thickens, and a spoonful of lemon juice at the end sharpens ripe-grape sweetness. Neither appears here.
Fruit butters are the thrifty end of preserving: no straining for clear jelly, no whole fruit to keep intact, just everything cooked down until the water has gone and the sugar and natural pectin hold it together. They belonged to households with an arbor and a glut, and grapes were the classic American arbor fruit — the Concord, selected in Massachusetts in the mid-nineteenth century, spread fast because it survived cold winters and cropped heavily, and its thick slip skin is exactly what this recipe is built around. The half-pound-of-sugar-to-a-pound-of-fruit ratio is much lower than a jam's, which is one reason fruit butters were traditionally sealed and stored rather than left to keep on sugar alone.