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Grape Water
1½ cups boiling water Wash grapes, mash, add water, simmer ten minutes, strain, chill, and serve.
A simple invalid's drink: grapes crushed, briefly simmered, strained and chilled. The method is sound, but the original leaves the fruit quantity and the sweetening to the cook's judgment.
- ProportionThe text gives 1½ cups boiling water without stating the weight of grapes. About 1 lb of grapes to that much water gives a drink with real flavor; less and it tastes like faintly tinted water.
- Grape varietyMany American recipes of this period would have been made with slip-skin grapes such as Concord, which are intensely aromatic and quite tart. Modern seedless table grapes are milder and sweeter, so the result will be blander and may want a squeeze of lemon.
- Do not boil hardTen minutes at a bare simmer is enough to break the fruit down and set the color. A rolling boil pulls bitterness from the skins and seeds and dulls the fresh grape aroma.
- StrainingPour through a fine sieve lined with damp cheesecloth and let it drip rather than pressing the pulp, which clouds the liquid. Cloudiness is harmless.
- SweeteningNo sugar is specified, on the assumption the grapes supply it. Taste after straining; a tablespoon or two of sugar stirred in while the liquid is still hot dissolves cleanly.
- SedimentGrape juice made this way throws a fine tartrate sediment as it chills. Decant off the clear liquid before serving, or refrigerate several hours and pour carefully.
- Yield and keepingA pound of grapes with this water gives roughly two cups, or two servings. It is not preserved in any way and should be kept covered in the refrigerator and drunk within two days.
Grape water belongs to the large body of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century "invalid cookery" — thin gruels, beef teas, barley waters and fruit waters made for the sick, the convalescent and small children, at a time when a household nurse was expected to cook as well as tend. Fruit waters were valued as something cooling and palatable that could be got down when solid food could not, and grapes in particular had a long reputation as a restorative; the so-called grape cure was fashionable in European spa towns through the same decades. Lowney's, a chocolate company, published its cook book to sell cocoa and baking chocolate, but it also aimed to be a complete household manual, so recipes for the sickroom sit alongside candies and chafing-dish suppers. The simmering here breaks down the fruit.