Grape Jelly
The chief art in making jelly is to boil it continuously, slowly and gently. It will not harden well if the boiling stops, even for a few moments. To preserve the true color and flavor of fruit in jellies or jams, boil well before adding the sugar; in this way the water contained in all fruit juices is evaporated. Heat the sugar before adding it. In making grape jelly, pick the grapes from their stems, wash them, put them over the fire in a vessel containing a little water to keep them from burning. Stew a few moments; mash gently with a silver spoon, strain, and to every pint of juice, allow one pound of white sugar. After the juice comes to the boiling point, boil twenty minutes, pour it over the heated sugar, and stir, constantly till all is dissolved. Then fill the jelly glasses.--J. I. M.
A workable jelly method that predates both commercial pectin and the candy thermometer, so the setting point is left entirely to the cook's judgment. A few adjustments bring it in line with current practice.
- The hinge: use some underripe fruitThis recipe relies on the grapes' own pectin, so a proportion of slightly underripe fruit helps it set. Fully ripe or overripe grapes give juice with less setting power, and boiling longer will not reliably make up for it. Concord or another slip-skin American grape is usually recommended; seedless table grapes tend to be lower in pectin.
- Judge the set by temperature, not the clockTwenty minutes is a rough guide that depends on your pan, your burner and the water in the fruit. Cook to 220F, or 8 degrees above the boiling point where you live, and confirm with the plate test: a spoonful chilled on a cold saucer should wrinkle when pushed.
- Sugar off the heat is the weak pointAs written the juice is boiled, then poured over warmed sugar and stirred to dissolve. Modern practice is to return the mixture to a full rolling boil for a minute or two after the sugar dissolves, then test for set, which gives a firmer, clearer result. Heating the sugar first, as the recipe directs, still helps it dissolve without cooling the juice.
- One pint to one poundA pint of juice is 2 cups; a pound of white sugar is about 2 1/4 cups. That ratio is close to modern practice and should not be reduced, since sugar is doing preservative as well as setting work here.
- The silver spoonNot affectation. Iron and other reactive metals darken fruit juice and dull the colour, and period jelly instructions often call for silver, wood or porcelain. Stainless steel is fine now.
- StrainingPour the mashed fruit into a scalded jelly bag or several layers of damp cheesecloth and let it drip. Squeezing forces pulp through and gives cloudy jelly. Grapes also throw tartrate crystals: chilling the strained juice overnight and pouring it carefully off the sediment gives a cleaner result.
- Filling and sealing"Fill the jelly glasses" meant open tumblers sealed with a paraffin cap, which is no longer recommended because the wax shrinks and lets mold in. Use half-pint canning jars with two-piece lids and process in a boiling water bath according to current guidance (about 5 minutes at sea level, adjusted for altitude and jar preparation), or refrigerate and eat within a few weeks.
- YieldAbout 4 lb of grapes gives roughly 2 pints of juice; the number of finished half-pint jars will vary with how far the jelly is boiled down.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by more than two hundred Virginia housekeepers, is full of recipes signed with initials like the "J. I. M." here, and the preserving chapter reflects a moment just before jelly making changed completely. Commercial powdered pectin did not reach American kitchens until the early twentieth century, so the whole craft lay in choosing fruit with enough natural pectin and boiling to the right point by eye. Grapes were an obvious candidate: the native fox grape and its cultivated descendant the Concord, introduced in Massachusetts in the 1850s, grew readily on arbors and fences across the mid-Atlantic, and their high acid and pectin made them one of the most forgiving fruits for a cook working without a thermometer. The insistence on boiling the juice before adding the sugar reflects a genuine observation, that driving off water early preserves fresh color and flavor, which is the same reasoning behind modern short-boil, high-pectin methods.