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Grape Sauce
1 pound Concord grapes 1 cup water 1/2 cup sugar Pick the grapes from the stems. Add the sugar and the water, and cook gently until tender.
A three-ingredient fruit sauce that depends almost entirely on the character of Concord grapes. The only real decision the original leaves to you is whether to strain out the skins and seeds.
- Seeds are the hingeConcords are a slip-skin grape with hard seeds that never soften. Cook the fruit until it collapses, then press it through a food mill or sieve; leaving the seeds in gives a gritty, faintly bitter sauce.
- Grape quantityOne pound is roughly 2 1/2 to 3 cups of picked grapes, and with the water and sugar added yields something in the region of two cups of finished sauce after straining — enough for about four servings over pudding, rice or ice cream.
- "Cook gently until tender"Twelve to twenty minutes at a bare simmer. The skins pop and the flesh dissolves quickly; long boiling drives off the grape aroma and dulls the colour from purple to brown.
- Water and thicknessA full cup of water to a pound of fruit makes a thin, pourable sauce. For something closer to a spoonable compote, use half the water or reduce the finished sauce uncovered.
- SugarHalf a cup is moderate for Concords, which carry real acid. Add half of it at the start and taste before adding the rest — ripe fruit late in the season needs less.
- SubstitutionsConcords are seasonal and regional. Any strongly aromatic slip-skin grape works; ordinary seedless table grapes give a sweet but flat sauce and will not need straining.
- KeepingThe book gives no storage note. Treat it as a fresh sauce: refrigerate in a covered jar and use within a week. It is not a preserve and has not been processed as one.
Meatless Cookery belongs to a wave of American cookbooks written when meat was scarce or rationed. The Concord grape it calls for was selected in Concord, Massachusetts, in the mid-nineteenth century and became widely grown in part because it ripened reliably in short northern summers — by the early twentieth century it was the grape behind commercial jelly and unfermented grape juice. A sauce like this one is what you make with fruit that is too soft to keep: cooked down, sweetened lightly, and poured over a plain cornstarch pudding or a slice of cake.