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Grape Juice
2/3 cup sugar 2 cups Concord grapes 1 cup cold water Wash grapes, pick over and remove stems. Add water and cook in a double boiler 1¼ hours. Add sugar and cook 30 minutes. Strain through double thickness of cheese cloth and bottle. For serving, dilute with crushed ice or cold water.
A small-batch juice from the sick-room chapter, cooked gently rather than boiled hard. It works as written; the only real change is how you store it.
- Treat it as fresh juice, not preservedStraining hot juice into a bottle is not canning — there is no processing step, no headspace and no seal specified. Refrigerate and drink within three or four days, or freeze it. Do not put it in a cupboard.
- Why the double boilerDirect heat scorches grape sugars and drives off the fresh aroma the recipe exists for. The double boiler holds the fruit just under boiling for the full hour and a quarter, which breaks the skins down and extracts colour without cooking the juice to jam.
- Concords specificallyConcord is a slip-skin American grape with a musky flavour and enough acid to carry the sugar. Supermarket table grapes are lower in acid and far blander; if you cannot get Concord, a red seeded grape with some tartness is closer than seedless green.
- QuantityTwo cups of grapes is roughly two-thirds of a pound. With a cup of water and the sugar dissolved into it, the finished strained juice comes to about a pint or a little less — a couple of glasses once diluted, which is the scale a sick-room recipe assumes.
- The sugar is high by modern tasteTwo-thirds of a cup to two cups of fruit is a lot by present standards; heavy sweetening was common in period sick-room drinks. Halving it gives something closer to modern grape juice; add it at the same point, after the long cooking.
- StrainingLet the juice drip through the cheesecloth rather than wringing it. Squeezing forces pulp and tannin through and gives a cloudy, slightly bitter result. A little sediment settling out in the refrigerator is normal — pour off the clear juice.
- Tartrate crystalsChilled grape juice often throws gritty crystals of cream of tartar on the bottom of the bottle. They are harmless and were expected; strain again if the texture bothers you.
Grape juice belongs to the temperance era as much as to the kitchen. Unfermented grape juice was promoted from the late nineteenth century as a communion wine substitute and as a wholesome drink for invalids, and Concord — an American grape introduced in Massachusetts in the mid-1800s — became its standard variety because it was hardy, heavily cropping and intensely flavoured. Its place here in a "Sick Room" chapter probably reflects what is often said of the period's dietary thinking about the ill: liquids, sweetness for energy, and fruit for what was vaguely understood as its corrective effect on the blood, all served cold and diluted so a patient with no appetite could take something. Philathea cook books were compiled by Philathea classes, young women's Bible-study groups attached to Baptist and other Protestant Sunday schools, which makes an alcohol-free grape drink an unsurprising inclusion.