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Grape Recipes To Preserve Grapes Uncooked
There are several methods of doing this and the attempt is worth making as grapes uncooked are at their best in flavour and health-giving elements. Unfermented grape juice the next best method of keeping the full grape value. GRAPES IN SAWDUST, SAND, ASHES, AND COTTON An old-fashioned method of keeping grapes (which, at the start, must be without blemish) was similar to methods now used with white grapes or those shipped any distance: packing in bran or sawdust thoroughly dried in the sun or moderate oven, then allowed to cool perfectly, spreading a layer of sawdust on the bottom of a box, then a layer of the fruit, with bran or sawdust between so that bunches cannot touch. The last layer of bran should be rather thick and the top of the box screwed on so that the grapes may both be air tight and not jarred more than necessary. Fine, well-sifted wood ashes and sand were also formerly used in this manner and not infrequently cotton wadding was employed in the same way.
This is a storage method rather than a cooked dish, and it works on the same principle as a root cellar: keep the fruit dry, still, dark and cold, and cut off the air movement that dries the stems. Two details in the original matter more than the rest — the packing medium must be bone dry, and the fruit must be flawless.
- The hinge: no blemishes, no exceptionsOne split or bruised berry will mould and take the whole box with it. Cut bunches with a length of stem attached, handle them by the stem only, and go over each bunch with scissors to remove any berry that is soft, cracked or wasp-marked.
- "Moderate oven" for drying the sawdustThe book gives no figure; "moderate" is conventionally reckoned somewhere around 325-350F, and a lower setting is safer for drying loose sawdust. Spread bran or sawdust in a thin layer on sheet pans, watch it, and let it cool completely to room temperature as the recipe insists. Warm packing material sweats inside a closed box and the fruit can mould.
- What sawdust to use nowUntreated hardwood shavings only — the kind sold as animal bedding. Do not use sawdust from a home workshop: it may contain plywood, MDF, glue, pressure-treated lumber or cedar and walnut resins, none of which belong against food.
- Skip the wood ashesSifted hardwood ash is strongly alkaline, and when damp it forms a caustic solution that can irritate or burn skin on prolonged contact. It was used because it was free and dry in many nineteenth-century houses. Cotton wadding or bran does the same job without the hazard.
- Cotton wadding is the easiest versionUnbleached cotton batting or plain tissue, one bunch to a nest, no bunches touching, in a shallow wooden or cardboard box. It is the least messy and the easiest to inspect.
- "Air tight" needs qualifyingThe intent is to stop air currents drying the stems, not to seal the box hermetically. A lidded box in a cold room is right; a taped-shut plastic tub will trap moisture and rot the fruit.
- Temperature the original takes for grantedThe text never states one, but the method presupposes an unheated fruit room or cellar, i.e. cold-storage conditions somewhere between freezing and the mid-40sF. Grapes will not keep long in a warm modern room by any packing method; use the coldest dry spot you have.
- Grape varietyThick-skinned, late-season, firmly attached grapes keep; thin-skinned dessert grapes and slip-skin Concords do not. Keeping time varies a good deal with variety and how cold the store is; check the box weekly, pulling any bunch that shows fuzz.
- YieldThe original gives no box size or quantity. Work to the rule it does give: bunches must not touch, with bran or sawdust between them, and note that the text does describe more than one layer of fruit in a box, the last layer of bran being rather thick.
Keeping grapes "uncooked" was a preoccupation of the American fruit-growing press through the second half of the nineteenth century, when native varieties such as the Concord (introduced in Massachusetts in the 1850s) suddenly gave ordinary households more grapes in September than they could eat. Bran, sawdust, sifted ash, sand and cotton wadding were all things a farm already had in quantity, and the same packing logic went into the crates that carried table grapes to city markets. The opening line about unfermented grape juice being "the next best method" suggests, though a single line can hardly settle it, some connection to the temperance orbit: Thomas Welch, a Methodist dentist, began bottling pasteurized grape juice in 1869 explicitly as an unfermented communion wine, and by the time this collection was written "unfermented" was a word with moral as well as culinary weight. The claim that raw grapes hold more "health-giving elements" is period vitalism rather than analysis — the term "vitamin" was only coined in 1912, and individual vitamins, vitamin C among them, were not isolated until the 1920s and 1930s — though it happens to be true that vitamin C survives cold storage better than boiling.