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Grape Conserve
5 lbs. grapes. 5 lbs. sugar. 1 lb. raisins. 1 lb. shelled walnuts 3 juicy oranges Remove the stems, skins, and seeds from the grapes, then cook the pulp in a casserole till tender and press it through a sieve. Boil the yellow skins of the oranges until tender, then chop fine.
Put them into an earthenware pan with the grape pulp, add the strained orange juice, sugar, raisins, and walnuts. Boil until quite thick; put into glasses and seal.
Green-gages Lump sugar
The text as printed has lost most of its ingredient list — only the walnuts and oranges survive, and the trailing "Green-gages / Lump sugar" belongs to the next recipe on the page. The method is complete enough to work from, but you will have to supply proportions.
- Missing quantitiesNo weight of grapes, sugar or raisins is given; the surviving list is 1 lb shelled walnuts and 3 oranges. A conserve of this type is normally built on about 4 lb of grapes, 3 lb of sugar and 1 lb of raisins, but that is a reconstruction, not what the book says.
- "Casserole" means the pan"Casserole" here is almost certainly a pot used on the stovetop rather than a baked dish — the recipe goes on to call for an earthenware pan. Any heavy wide saucepan will do; wide is better than deep, since the conserve has to reduce.
- The grapes are slip-skin varietiesThe grapes are probably slip-skin varieties -- Removing "stems, skins, and seeds" points to American grapes such as Concord or Isabella, whose skins come away under thumb pressure, though seeded European grapes could also be peeled. Modern seedless table grapes will not behave this way.
- Yellow skins onlyPare the zest without the white pith, which is the bitter part. Boiling in a change or two of water helps draw off the bitterness.
- Add the walnuts lateA pound of nuts boiled through a long reduction turns soft and can throw a faint rancid bitterness into the syrup. Stir them in during the last five minutes.
- Judging "quite thick"Look for 220F on a thermometer, or a spoonful that sheets rather than drips. Grapes carry a fair amount of pectin, so the set may come reasonably quickly.
- Sealing"Put into glasses and seal" most likely meant tumblers or jars closed with waxed paper or a disc of paraffin wax. Use proper canning jars and a ten-minute boiling-water bath, or refrigerate and eat within a few weeks.
Conserve, as distinct from jam or jelly, is a preserve carrying whole fruit, dried fruit and nuts through the sugar — a richer, chunkier thing meant for the tea table or to eat alongside meat rather than simply spread on bread. Grape conserve with orange peel, raisins and walnuts was a standard American autumn preserve wherever Concord grapes grew, and by the late nineteenth century they grew widely in the east; the variety is generally traced to Ephraim Bull's seedling, which first fruited in Concord, Massachusetts in 1849 and was introduced in the mid-1850s, and its thick slip skins and musky pulp made the tedious skinning-and-sieving step worth it. Its appearance in a casserole-cookery book is perhaps a reminder that before the flameproof earthenware pot became associated with slow oven dishes, it may simply have been a good heavy vessel for anything that needed steady, even heat without scorching — and reducing a sugary fruit pulp is exactly that job.