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Grape Juice
15 C Concord grapes, stripped 3 C sugar 9 C water Wash grapes, add 5 C water and boil until soft. Strain through cheesecloth, return skins and seeds to kettle with 4 C water and cook again and strain. Add sugar to juice and boil 5 minutes. Strain and bottle.
Minnie Dymond.
A two-extraction juice of the sort made every September when the Concord arbor came in all at once. The measurements are all in cups, which makes scaling straightforward, but the recipe stops at "bottle" and leaves storage entirely to the cook.
- YieldFifteen cups of grapes is roughly 5 lb, and with 9 cups of added water the finished sweetened juice comes to somewhere near 3 quarts. Use a large kettle, at least 8 quarts, since the first boil foams.
- "Stripped"This means pulled off the stems. Stems carry harsh tannin and a green, woody note, so it is worth picking through carefully rather than tossing in whole clusters.
- Concord specificallyConcord is a slip-skin American grape with the pronounced musky flavor most people associate with grape juice. Table grapes such as Thompson or red globe will give a thin, flat result; if you cannot find Concord, look for Niagara or another labrusca variety.
- The second extractionReturning the skins and seeds to the kettle with more water is the point of the method: the color and most of the aroma sit in the skins, not the pulp. Do not skip it, and do not boil the second batch hard or long enough to break the seeds, which are bitter.
- StrainingLet the juice drip through the cheesecloth rather than wringing it. Squeezing forces fine pulp through and gives a cloudy juice that never settles clear.
- Tartrate sedimentConcord juice throws gritty crystals of potassium bitartrate as it cools. Traditional practice is to let the strained juice stand overnight in a cool place, then pour it off the sediment before the final boil and bottling.
- SugarThree cups is generous by current taste, and the fruit's own sweetness varies with the season. Add half, taste, and adjust; the sugar here is for flavor, not preservation.
- StorageThe instruction to "strain and bottle" assumes a cellar and quick use. Treat this as a fresh juice: refrigerate it and drink it within a week, or freeze it. If you want it shelf-stable, follow a current tested water-bath canning guide for grape juice rather than the bare direction given here.
Concord grape juice as a household staple owes a good deal to the temperance movement, and to Thomas Bramwell Welch, a Methodist dentist who in the 1860s applied Pasteur's heating method to grape juice so that his congregation could take unfermented communion wine. By the period when cookbooks of this kind were being assembled, bottled grape juice had become both a respectable beverage and a way to use up an arbor's worth of fruit that ripens in a matter of days. The Concord variety was developed in Massachusetts in the mid-nineteenth century and was widely planted for exactly this purpose, being hardy, heavy-bearing, and far too foxy in flavor to make good table wine.