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Green Grapes Pickled
Have the grapes (not yet coloured but full-size) stemmed, washed, and drained and let stand in brine twelve hours, when drain and rinse. Spice vinegar as for other pickles but let it get cold before pouring over the grapes.
A two-sentence recipe that assumes you already know how the rest of the pickle shelf works. The essentials are underripe fruit, a salt soak, and vinegar that goes on cold.
- The hinge: cold vinegarThe recipe is explicit that the spiced vinegar must be cold before it goes over the grapes. Hot vinegar is generally held to soften the skins and slacken the fruit, and the cold pour is what keeps them firm.
- "Not yet coloured but full-size"Green, hard, sour fruit that has stopped swelling but has not begun to sweeten; hardness and size are the real test, since some varieties never colour. Fully ripe table grapes will not give the same firm, sour result; this is a use for thinnings or for a bunch picked deliberately early. Seedless varieties save the eating trouble.
- The brine is unmeasuredPeriod books vary widely in brine strength, from mild salt water up to the familiar "strong enough to float an egg," which is very salty indeed. The original gives no figure at all, so treat it as ambiguous and follow a current pickling recipe for the ratio rather than guessing.
- "Spice vinegar as for other pickles"A cross-reference to a spiced vinegar made elsewhere in the book: vinegar simmered with whole spices and strained. Recipes of this kind vary, but mustard seed, peppercorns, allspice, cloves and cinnamon are common, sometimes with sugar. Use vinegar of at least 5 percent acidity, which is standard supermarket strength; older household vinegars varied widely.
- Rinse properlyThe instruction to drain and rinse after the brine is not a formality. Skipping it leaves the finished pickle unpleasantly salty.
- StorageThere is no processing step here and no sealing instruction, so this is not a shelf-stable preserve by modern standards. Jar it, keep it in the refrigerator, and eat it within a couple of months; if you want a cupboard pickle, use a tested water-bath recipe.
- ServingThese were a relish, not a fruit dish. They belong beside cold roast meat, ham, game or a strong cheese, in the same role as pickled walnuts or damsons.
Unripe grapes were a kitchen staple long before they were a pickle: verjuice, the sour juice pressed from green grapes, was the standard souring agent in medieval and early modern European cooking, and vineyards routinely thinned their crop, leaving cooks with quantities of hard green fruit. Pickling in spiced vinegar was the ordinary nineteenth-century answer to any firm, sour, plentiful thing, and grapes joined walnuts, nasturtium buds, samphire and green tomatoes on the relish shelf. The recipe's brevity is telling. Its instruction to proceed as for other pickles assumes the reader already keeps a jug of spiced vinegar and knows the brine drill; only the two details peculiar to grapes, the underripe fruit and the cold pour, needed saying at all.