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Grape Butter
3 cups vinegar 2 teaspoons each of cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, and allspice Cook all together until thick; press through a sieve to remove seeds. Fill glasses and seal.
The text as printed is incomplete, and the preserving method it describes is one that current guidance has abandoned. Both problems matter.
- The fruit and sugar are missingA grape butter needs grapes and sugar, and neither appears in the ingredient list here — only vinegar and four spices. The line has been truncated somewhere between the original setting and this printing, so there is no way to know how many pounds of grapes or how much sugar the author intended.
- Three cups of vinegar is not a seasoningThat volume suggests a large quantity of fruit, likely several pounds, though the text gives no way to check. Without the fruit weight the acid-to-fruit ratio is unknowable, and acidity is one of the factors that governs whether a preserve keeps.
- Two teaspoons of each spiceCloves and allspice at that strength read as assertive to a modern palate, and spiced fruit butters of this kind sit closer to a chutney than a jam. Judging the balance again depends on a fruit quantity the text does not supply.
- "Fill glasses and seal"No closure is specified; in books of this period the seal on jelly glasses was often a paraffin cap. Either way this is open-kettle filling, relying on the heat of the product alone to sterilise the glass and form the seal, and it is no longer considered a safe closure — paraffin shrinks and cracks, and mould grows in the gap. No processing time or temperature is given.
- Thickness is the only doneness cue"Cook all together until thick" gives no time, no temperature and no sheet or spoon test. Fruit butters scorch readily once they thicken, and the point at which they are safe to jar is not the same as the point at which they look thick.
- What to do insteadUse a current tested recipe for spiced grape butter, with weighed fruit and sugar and a specified boiling-water-bath processing time for the jar size.
Fruit butters were the thrifty end of the preserving shelf: fruit cooked down long and slow until the pulp itself thickened, sieved to remove skins and seeds, and sweetened and spiced rather than set with pectin. Grape butter in an early twentieth-century American book likely means Concord or a similar slip-skin grape, whose tough skins and hard seeds make sieving essential and whose September glut gave households more fruit than they could eat fresh. The vinegar and the quartet of cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon and allspice mark this as a spiced butter, often said to descend from an older English tradition ŏ closer kin to the sweet-sour fruit sauces served with cold meat than to a breakfast spread. Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and, as house cookbooks of the era often did, it wrapped a full general-purpose kitchen manual around the maker's own product, which is why a preserving chapter with no chocolate in it sits in a chocolate company's book at all.