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Grape Juice
"He bid me taste of it: and 'twas--the Grape." Rubaiyat. Grape Juice No. 1 Wash grapes and stem them and put into a porcelain-lined kettle with just enough water to cover. Bring to the boiling point. Mash through a sieve and drain overnight through a jelly bag. Next morning bring to boiling point, skim, and boil fifteen minutes. Pour into hot sterilized bottles, and put in corks that have been dipped in boiling water. Fill wash boiler partly full of hot water. Place the corks in the bottles, and put on their sides in the boiler, on a rack. Cover, and boil continuously for one hour. Take from the boiler, and dip the corks into sealing wax. Keep in a cool dry place. Grape Juice No. 2 Wash and stem grapes and cook with a little water until soft. Mash through a sieve and then drain through a jelly bag overnight. In the morning boil for twenty minutes and pour into hot sterilized jars, that have had the tops sterilized and the rubbers dipped in hot water. Seal and put in a light dry place. At the end of two months open the jars and pour into bottles to within two inches of the top. Put in corks, not too tight, and stand in a wash boiler of cold water; the water should only come half way up the bottles. Boil for an hour. Put the corks in tight and cover with sealing wax. The grape juice is said to be better flavored when made by this method. Grape Juice No. 3 In a preserving kettle pour one pint of water over three pints of grapes. Cook slowly over fire for five minutes. Strain through a jelly bag, add one half pint of sugar, and when dissolved serve in glasses with cracked ice. Grape Juice No. 4 Put well-washed grapes, free from stems, into a kettle and just cover with water. Cook until soft, and drain through a jelly bag overnight. Measure, and to each quart of juice add one cup of sugar and one cup of water. Bring to boiling point, skim, and bottle. When cold dip corks in sealing wax.
Four variations on the same operation: extract the juice, let it settle, seal it hot. The differences are in how much sugar goes in and how long the juice is allowed to rest before final bottling.
- Do not squeeze the bagThe whole quality of the result depends on letting the juice drain through the jelly bag by gravity overnight. Wringing or pressing forces pulp and tannin through and gives a cloudy juice with a hard, astringent edge.
- Heat the grapes, don't cook them"Bring to the boiling point" and "cook until soft" ask for only enough heat to burst the skins and free the juice. Grapes held at a hard boil taste stewed and give up bitter compounds from skins and seeds.
- Porcelain-lined kettleThis means non-reactive. Grape juice is acidic enough to pick up metallic flavors and dull color from bare cast iron, aluminum or copper; enameled steel or stainless is the equivalent today.
- Jelly bag and wash boilerA jelly bag is a cone of muslin or four layers of cheesecloth hung over a bowl. A wash boiler was the large oval zinc or copper tub used for laundry; a tall stockpot with a rack in the bottom does the same job, and the rack matters, since bottles resting on bare metal can crack.
- Corks and sealing waxWaxed corks were the period seal and they are the weak point here. Modern canning jars with two-piece lids, or bottles closed after a tested boiling-water process, hold a reliable vacuum where a cork does not. If you can juice, follow current tested processing times for grape juice rather than the one-hour boil given here.
- No. 4 is unprocessedThat version bottles hot juice and seals it with wax, with no boiling-water treatment at all. Grape juice is high in acid, which is why the method survived, but hot-fill-and-seal without processing is not reliable in a home kitchen. Treat No. 4 as a syrup to refrigerate and drink within a week, or process it properly.
- The two-month rest in No. 2Held in sealed jars, the juice throws down a sediment of potassium bitartrate (cream of tartar, historically "argol") along with fine pulp. Pouring the juice off into fresh bottles at that stage, as No. 2 does, leaves that sediment behind, which would account for the claim that this method gives a better-flavoured juice.
- StorageNo. 2 says a "light dry place," which is the one instruction to ignore. Light bleaches the purple out of grape juice and speeds off-flavors; store it dark, and cool as No. 1 says.
- Sugar and yieldThe half pint of sugar in No. 3 is one cup. No. 4's cup of sugar and cup of water per quart produces a sweetened, slightly diluted juice rather than a concentrate.
- Which grapesA book of this sort would most likely have had Concord or a similar slip-skin native grape in mind, which is part of why heating is used to release the juice from the skins. Table grapes from a supermarket give a paler, flatter juice.
This comes from a book of non-alcoholic drinks, and the Rubaiyat epigraph reads as a small joke at the expense of abstinence: the grape, but only so far. Unfermented grape juice as a commercial product is generally traced to Thomas Bramwell Welch, a Methodist dentist who in 1869 pasteurized bottled grape juice as an "unfermented wine" for communion, and by the 1910s it had become the respectable temperance drink par excellence, served at receptions and famously at State Department functions. Four recipes in a row, differing mainly in sweetening and settling time, suggest the home-bottled version had its place in the household year, when Concord grapes came in and a wash boiler was equipment enough to put up a winter supply.