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Canned Grapes
6 quarts grapes 1 quart sugar 1/2 cup water Squeeze the pulp out of the skins; cook for five minutes; rub through a sieve fine enough to retain the seeds; return to the preserving kettle with the water and skins; bring slowly to the boiling point, removing the scum. Cook for fifteen minutes.
This is an open-kettle recipe: fruit is cooked, then presumably ladled into jars and left to seal itself. That method has been out of currency for a century, and the recipe as printed leaves out every step that would make the contents keep.
- No processing step at allThe instructions end with "cook for fifteen minutes." There is no jar preparation, no filling, no headspace, no lid, and no boiling-water bath. Nothing here brings the sealed jar to a temperature that destroys the mold and yeast introduced while filling.
- Open-kettle canning is no longer acceptedPouring hot fruit into a jar and inverting it or letting it cool to form a vacuum was standard practice into the 1920s. It fails because the jar rim, the lid and the air in the headspace are never sterilized, and the resulting seal is unreliable and often loses vacuum weeks later.
- The sugar is not a preservative hereOne quart of sugar to six quarts of grape pulp is a light proportion, well below jam or jelly density. It will not lower water activity enough to inhibit surface mold, so this needs a real seal and a real heat process to be shelf stable.
- Grapes are high-acid, which changes the hazard but does not remove itBotulism is not the main risk in a fruit of roughly pH 3.3. What you get instead is mold, wild yeast fermentation and pushed lids -- spoilage rather than poisoning, but the jars are still not safe to eat from and the loss is total.
- No indication of jar type or sizeThe recipe never says what to put the fruit in. In this period it would most likely have been a Mason-type jar with a zinc cap or a glass lid sealed by a rubber ring. Those closures are hard to source today, and a modern two-piece lid behaves differently. The recipe gives no yield, so there is no way to know how many jars to prepare.
- If you want to put grapes upUse a current tested procedure from a food-preservation authority, which will specify jar size, headspace, and a measured boiling-water-bath time. Do not adapt this text by adding a guessed processing time.
- The technique itself is soundSqueezing the pulp from slip-skin grapes, cooking it briefly, sieving out the seeds and returning the skins is still the right way to handle Concords. Made in a small batch and refrigerated or frozen rather than canned, it is a good grape butter base.
Slip-skin American grapes -- Concord above all, along with Niagara and Catawba -- separate cleanly into a slick pulp and a tough, deeply colored skin, and many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century grape recipes are built around that fact. The pulp is cooked and sieved to strip out the hard seeds, and the skins go back in for color and body, which is exactly the sequence here. Household canning of this kind was seasonal work done in quantity: six quarts of grapes is a picking rather than a single dessert. The loose-leaf format of Mrs. Fryer's book is itself a period marker. Through the 1910s and 1920s state agricultural extension services campaigned hard against the open-kettle method that this recipe assumes, in favor of processing filled and closed jars in boiling water for a stated time.