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Grapes Sealed with Wax
Have ready hot sealing wax and in it dip the cut ends of each bunch-stem. Remove all imperfect grapes and place bunch in a bag of thin paper or a sheet of some soft paper, gathering it up at the corners and tying around the stem snugly, fastening to the latter a string by which it may be hung till needed. Keep fruit if possible in a cool, dry, dark place.
BOTTLED GRAPES (Country Life in America) French vine growers, according to Country Life in America, preserve grapes by leaving five or six inches of stem II2 when cutting the bunches. These stems are inserted in large-mouthed bottles of water, the grapes themselves hanging outside, and the bottles are placed in racks in cellars where there is a uniform low temperature.
UNFERMENTED GRAPE JUICE No. I Heat the thoroughly ripe grapes slowly-in a doubleboiler or crock-on the back of the stove or in a slow oven. When the skins are tender strain through cheese cloth bag without squeezing. When juice has been replaced on stove and is at boiling point, add half as much sugar as juice Let dissolve perfectly then seal while hot.
UNFERMENTED GRAPE JUICE No. 2 Wash, crush, and heat the fruit, simmering for thirty minutes. Crush again, strain, and squeeze hard through a bag. Replace juice on stove, let boil and skim, then add one-fourth pint of sugar to each pint of juice, letting dissolve and boiling about six minutes. Fill heated bottles and seal at once.
UNFERMENTED GRAPE JUICE No. 3 (Without Sugar) Mash, boil, and press grapes. Have bottles ready on a false wooden bottom in a large boiler. Fill bottles with the cooled juice, pour cold water in the boiler up to the necks of the bottles, let the whole heat, and boil for ten minutes. As the juice may evaporate the bottles should be filled up from one special bottle. Cork and seal while hot.
UNFERMENTED GRAPE JUICE No. 4 (Without Sugar) A second method of preserving the juice without sugar is to mash the fresh grapes before heating them. Strain off the juice, then heat to boiling point as above.
FRUITS PRESERVED IN GRAPE JUICE (Miss Parloa) No sugar is needed when fruits are put up in grape juice. Heat grape juice till reduced one-third (six quarts reduced to four quarts), then place in it the prepared fruit (as for other preserves). Have it well covered with juice and slowly boil till the fruit is translucent and tender, when place at once in heated jars and seal.
This is a cluster of grape-keeping methods rather than a single recipe, and the four juice formulas plus the Parloa preserve all end in sealing methods that no current food-safety authority accepts. The notes below explain the vocabulary and then why the canning instructions fail.
- Open-kettle sealing is the problemNumbers 1 and 2 pour hot juice into bottles and seal, with no processing of the filled, closed container; No. 4's "heat to boiling point as above" is ambiguous and may or may not carry over the water-bath of No. 3. Nothing sterilises the headspace or the closure once it is on. Mould and yeast spoilage of the finished bottles is the usual outcome; high-acid grape juice will not support botulism, but it will happily ferment or grow surface mould.
- The Parloa preserve is the weakest of the groupFruit boiled in reduced grape juice, packed hot and sealed, again with no processing of the sealed jar, and no sugar to help preserve it. "Prepared fruit" is left entirely undefined, so the acidity of the finished pack is unknown. Use a current tested recipe if you want to can fruit in juice.
- Number 3 is closest to a real process, and still shortBoiling filled bottles ten minutes on a wooden rack in a boiler is recognisably a water bath. But the bottles are corked and waxed after processing, which recontaminates the seal, and the ten minutes is not tied to any jar size or altitude.
- Sealing wax on the stemsPeriod sealing wax was typically shellac and rosin coloured with pigment, sometimes toxic pigments such as vermilion (mercuric sulphide) or red lead. It is dipped onto the cut stem, not the fruit, but it is not a food material and modern equivalents are no better.
- "A slow oven"Roughly 250-325F in period usage. Number 1 wants the grapes barely heated until the skins are tender, not cooked, so the back of the stove or a double boiler does the same job with less risk of scorching.
- The sugar quantitiesNumber 1's "half as much sugar as juice" is a very heavy syrup by modern taste. Number 2's "one-fourth pint of sugar to each pint of juice" is half a cup of sugar per two cups of juice, measured by volume as was normal then.
- "False wooden bottom"A wooden slat rack laid in the bottom of the boiler so the glass never touches the hot metal directly. A folded towel or a canning rack serves the same purpose.
- The French bottle methodThe Country Life in America note describes a French growers' practice of leaving a long stem, standing it in a large-mouthed bottle of water with the fruit hanging free, in a cellar at a uniform low temperature. It is storage, not preservation, and depends on the cellar holding that steady temperature.
Unfermented grape juice was a product of the American temperance movement as much as of the orchard. The technique of pasteurising pressed grape juice so that it would keep without turning to wine is generally credited to Thomas Bramwell Welch, a Methodist dentist who wanted an unfermented communion cup in the 1860s, and by the time this book was compiled the phrase "unfermented grape juice" often carried that moral charge. The rest of the page shows how many registers a single fruit occupied: sealing wax and paper bags for the dessert table, French cellar practice credited to Country Life in America, a magazine of gentlemanly country living founded in 1901, and a sugarless preserving syrup from Maria Parloa of the Boston Cooking School, who was one of the most widely reprinted authorities of the period. What none of them had was a thermometer in the jar, which is precisely what separates this page from a modern canning manual.