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Grape Conserve
One small basket Concord grapes, cook until soft enough to mash through colander. To three pints of the juice, add the pulp and peel of two oranges cut into tiny pieces, 1/2 lb. raisins, stoned and cut fine, and eight cups sugar. Boil just twenty minutes and when taken from fire, add one cup English walnut meats, chopped fine. Let the conserve cool and just before pouring it into the jelly glasses, stir thoroughly, else the nuts may sink to the bottom. Cover with paraffin when cold. This amount will fill about ten jelly glasses.
— Mrs. M. Howard Ferguson
A classic American conserve: grape jam padded out with citrus, raisins and nuts. Most of what needs translating here is the measures and the sealing method.
- "One small basket"Concord grapes were sold in splint baskets of the period, commonly in four- and eight-quart sizes; a small one was probably the four-quart, on the order of 5 to 6 lb of fruit, though the recipe does not say. Work from the yield instead: you want three pints of grape juice and pulp after cooking the fruit soft and mashing it through a colander.
- Slipskin grapesConcords are slipskins: the pulp squeezes out of the skin easily and the seeds stay in the pulp. Cooking until soft and pushing through a colander is really a seed-removal step. If you want the flavour and colour of the skins, cook them separately and chop them in rather than discarding what the colander catches.
- SugarEight cups is about 3 1/2 lb, roughly equal in weight to the three pints of juice it is boiled with. That high proportion of sugar is what makes the conserve keep and set; cutting it substantially will give you a loose, perishable sauce rather than a preserve.
- "Boil just twenty minutes"Twenty minutes at a full rolling boil is the practical instruction, but trust the set, not the clock. Grapes and oranges both carry pectin, so the mixture should sheet off a spoon or read about 220F before it comes off the heat.
- Raisins, stonedRaisins in 1900 often still contained seeds, hence "stoned and cut fine." Modern seedless raisins need only chopping, and a quick soak in hot water keeps them from going leathery in the boil.
- Jelly glassesA jelly glass of the period held about 6 to 8 oz, so ten of them is somewhere between about 3 3/4 and 5 pints. Half-pint canning jars are the closest modern equivalent.
- Skip the paraffinSealing with melted wax is no longer recommended: the wax shrinks and pulls away from the glass, and mould grows in the gap. Fill clean half-pint jars, seal with two-piece lids and process in a boiling water bath, or simply refrigerate or freeze the conserve and eat it within a few weeks.
- Keeping the nuts suspendedThe recipe's warning is that the nuts settle to the bottom of a thin, hot syrup. Letting the conserve cool until it begins to thicken and then stirring it well before filling is what holds them evenly through the jars.
"Conserve" in American cookbooks of this era meant something more elaborate than jam: fruit boiled with sugar but extended with raisins, citrus and nutmeats, thick enough to eat with meat as well as on bread. The base here is the Concord grape, a native slipskin variety selected in Concord, Massachusetts in the 1840s and 1850s by Ephraim Wales Bull, which by 1900 dominated northern grape growing and turned up in juice, jelly and preserves in nearly every regional cookbook. The Philathea class cookbooks were compiled by young women's Bible study groups of a Sunday-school movement that began in Baptist churches but soon became interdenominational, and sold to raise funds, which is why so many entries carry a contributor's married name ecrecipes like this one circulated as personal reputations before they were print.