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Fox Grape Preserves
Seed the grapes, then pour scalding water on them and let them stand till cold; then draw off the water, put one pound sugar to one pound of grapes, and boil gently about twenty minutes.--Mrs. A. D.
A two-ingredient preserve that depends entirely on the grape. Fox grapes are slip-skin varieties of Vitis labrusca — Concord is the one you can still buy — and the whole method is built around their loose skins and large seeds.
- The hinge: seed them rawSqueeze each grape so the pulp pops out of the skin, simmer the pulp two or three minutes until the seeds loosen, then push it through a sieve or food mill and return it to the reserved skins. Picking seeds out of whole raw grapes, as the terse original implies, is very slow work.
- What the scalding water doesIt softens and loosens the tough skins, and is usually said to take some of the astringency that sits just under them. The water is drawn off once cold and discarded; do not try to save it as juice.
- Pound for poundEqual weights of sugar and prepared fruit; a pound of sugar is roughly 2 1/4 cups. Weigh after seeding and skinning, not before, or the proportion of sugar to actual fruit will be higher than intended.
- Twenty minutes is honestConcord grapes are high in both pectin and acid, so a gentle 20-minute boil genuinely sets. Watch for 220F on a thermometer, or a spoonful that wrinkles on a chilled plate. Overcooking turns the flavour caramel and dulls the grape.
- Gently means gentlyA hard rolling boil scorches sugar on the bottom of the pan and makes the preserve bitter. Use a wide heavy pan, keep it at a lazy simmer, and stir across the base rather than around the sides.
- Storage the book leaves outMrs. A. D. gives no sealing instructions, which is usual for the short recipes in this book; period preserves were often put up in crocks under paper, sometimes brandied. Refrigerate and use within a month, or follow a current water-bath canning process for jams if you want shelf-stable jars.
- YieldTwo pounds of grapes with their sugar gives roughly four to five half-pint jars.
"Fox grape" is the old American name for Vitis labrusca, the wild eastern grape whose musky, faintly animal aroma is often said to have given rise to the tasting term "foxy," though the origin of the name is disputed. It grew thick along fence rows and river banks through Virginia and the whole eastern seaboard, which is why a preserve like this one needed no shopping list — the fruit was free for the gathering in September. The domesticated form most cooks now meet is the Concord, selected by Ephraim Bull in Massachusetts in the 1840s from local wild seedlings. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by some 250 Virginia housewives, is full of these short initialled recipes: they were written for women who already knew how a preserve behaved and needed only the proportion and the time.