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Grape Farina
Stew clean, stemmed grapes till soft enough to put through a sieve. Allow for each cup of this two tablespoons of farina and proceed as for blackberry farina.
A fruit-thickened cereal mould of the kind that turns up throughout early twentieth-century fruit cookery. The original leans on a companion recipe, so the method has to be reconstructed from the ratio it gives.
- What farina isFarina here is the coarse middlings of hard wheat sold as a hot breakfast cereal — Cream of Wheat and its equivalents. Semolina behaves the same way; instant or quick-cooking versions thicken faster and can go pasty, so use the regular grind.
- The method it points to"Proceed as for blackberry farina" points to a recipe not reproduced here, so the method has to be inferred from standard farina practice: bring the sieved pulp to a boil, rain the farina in slowly while stirring so it does not lump, and cook gently until it thickens and loses its raw starch taste — usually around 10 minutes. Pour into wet moulds or cups, chill until set, and turn out.
- The ratioTwo tablespoons per cup of pulp gives a soft, spoonable set rather than a firm unmoulded shape. If you want something that stands up on a plate, closer to three tablespoons per cup will be needed.
- Which grapesAlmost certainly written with slip-skin American grapes in mind — Concord, Catawba, Niagara and the like — which are seedy and more strongly flavoured than table grapes, hence the stewing and sieving. Seedless table grapes need no sieve and are much blander; a little lemon juice restores the edge.
- SievingPush the softened fruit through a fine sieve or food mill rather than a blender. A blender pulverises seeds and skins into the pulp and makes it bitter and gritty.
- SugarNo sugar appears in this line, though sweetening may have been specified in the blackberry recipe it defers to. Concord pulp usually wants sugar; add it to the pulp before the farina goes in, tasting as you go.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantities beyond the ratio; reckon on roughly a cup of pulp per mould. Serve cold with cream, or with a thin custard poured round.
Fruit farinas belong to a family of moulded cereal puddings — farina, cornstarch, tapioca, sago — that filled the dessert column of American cookbooks from the 1880s through the First World War. They were cheap, they used up fruit at the height of a short season, and they were regarded as light enough for invalids and children, a category of cookery that had its own chapters and its own strict logic about what was digestible. That the book gives the blackberry version in full is characteristic of the genre: once a cook knew the proportion of starch to pulp, the fruit was interchangeable. The grapes in question would have been the American slip-skin varieties rather than European wine grapes; the Concord, the most widely grown of them, is generally traced to Ephraim Bull's seedlings in Concord, Massachusetts, in the 1840s, and it is often said to have been the mainstay of the eastern grape harvest by 1900, along with the jelly, juice and dessert recipes that came with it.