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Grape Jelly
Remove stems from grapes. Mash; boil twenty minutes; strain, but do not squeeze; proceed as for Currant Jelly. Half ripe and half green grapes make the best jelly.
A cross-reference recipe: the grape work is here, the actual jelly-making is under Currant Jelly, which means measuring sugar against strained juice and boiling to the set. A few things the original assumes you already know.
- Do not squeeze the bagThis is the hinge of the whole recipe. Pressing the pulp forces fine sediment through the cloth and the jelly turns cloudy and dull. Let it drip through a jelly bag or several layers of damp cheesecloth for several hours, or overnight, and accept the smaller yield.
- Why half green grapesUnderripe fruit carries more pectin and more acid, both of which a fully ripe grape has lost to sugar. Without commercial pectin this mix is what makes the jelly set at all, so the instruction is structural rather than a matter of taste.
- The Currant Jelly method it points toMany period recipes used a cup of sugar to each cup of strained juice, the sugar warmed before it went in, then a hard boil until the syrup sheeted from the spoon; the book's own Currant Jelly entry is the one to read for its actual proportions. The sheeting point is about 220F (8 degrees above boiling) at sea level, and a thermometer is more reliable than the spoon.
- Tartrate crystalsConcord and other slip-skin grapes throw cream of tartar crystals that feel like grit in the finished jelly. Chill the strained juice overnight and pour it off the sediment before cooking.
- Boiling the mashed fruitTwenty minutes with the skins and seeds is what gives the colour and much of the pectin. The recipe calls for no water; if the mash threatens to catch, add only the little needed to start the juice, since more water means a longer boil later and a flatter flavour.
- SealingThe period method was hot jars topped with melted paraffin. Current practice is a boiling-water bath of about ten minutes for half-pint jars; unprocessed jelly under wax should be treated as refrigerator jelly and used within a few weeks.
- YieldThe original gives none. Roughly 4 lb of grapes yields about 4 cups of strained juice, which with equal sugar makes about five half-pint jars.
Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and like most house-brand cookbooks of the era it printed a full domestic repertoire around the sections that sold its own product. The preserving chapter is written for households that put up fruit by the bushel each autumn, which is why so many entries are two lines long and point to one another: currant jelly carries the full method and everything else is a variation on it. Grape jelly's rise in the American kitchen is generally traced to the spread of the Concord grape, bred in Massachusetts in the mid-nineteenth century and hardy enough to grow on a back fence throughout the Northeast. The insistence on half-green fruit belongs to the years before packaged pectin was widely sold; cooks managed set entirely by choosing fruit at the right stage and boiling long enough, and a jelly that failed to firm was a fault of judgment rather than of the recipe.