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Grape Marmalade
Pick over, wash, drain, and remove stems from grapes. Separate pulp from skins. Put pulp in preserving kettle. Heat to boiling-point, and cook slowly until seeds separate from pulp; then rub through a hair sieve. Return to kettle with skins, add an equal measure of sugar, and cook slowly thirty minutes, occasionally stirring to prevent burning. Put in a stone jar or tumblers.
A slip-skin grape method that survives unchanged in modern preserving books. The whole point is separating skin from pulp so the seeds can be cooked out, then reuniting the two for texture and color.
- Use slip-skin grapesThis only works with American varieties — Concord, Niagara, Catawba — whose skins pop off when pinched at the stem end. European table grapes such as Thompson Seedless have skins that cling and no seeds to strain, so the whole procedure is pointless with them.
- The hinge: cook the pulp only until the seeds loosenGenerally a few minutes of gentle simmering. Longer, harder cooking risks scorching the pulp, and scorched pulp will flavor the whole batch.
- Hair sieveA horsehair-mesh sieve, fine enough to hold back seeds. A fine-mesh stainless strainer with a wooden spoon or a food mill fitted with the fine plate does the same job faster.
- Preserving kettleA wide pan; period preserving kettles were often copper or brass, modern equivalents enameled cast iron or heavy stainless. Width matters more than depth, since evaporation is what thickens the marmalade.
- "An equal measure of sugar"Read as measured by volume against the combined pulp and skins, not the original weight of the grapes. That is a high ratio by modern taste; reducing the sugar will give a softer set.
- Thirty minutes is a guide, not a ruleJudge by a sheeting test off a cold spoon or 220F on a candy thermometer at sea level. Concord grapes are high in pectin and acid, so the set often arrives early.
- Storage"Stone jar or tumblers" means open-kettle filling; tumblers of this period were commonly finished with a paraffin cap, though the recipe does not say so. Skip both. Either refrigerate and eat within a few weeks, or fill sterilized half-pint jars and process in a boiling-water bath using current times for grape jam.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity. Four pounds of Concords yields roughly three to four half-pint jars.
Grape marmalade of this kind belongs squarely to the northeastern American autumn, and to the Concord grape in particular — a variety generally traced to Ephraim Bull's seedlings in Concord, Massachusetts, in the late 1840s, which within a generation had become the dooryard grape of New England. Fannie Farmer's book came out of Boston in 1896, and the pulp-and-skin technique here is a direct response to what that grape is: thick slip-skin, seedy flesh, intense flavor concentrated in the skin. Discard the skins and you lose the color and most of the perfume; leave the seeds in and the preserve is inedible. Splitting the fruit and recombining it is still how Concord jam is made.