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Jams (Point mash and boil thirty)
point, mash, and boil thirty minutes; then proceed as for Currant Jelly. Wild grapes make the best jelly.
This entry survives only as a fragment — it begins mid-sentence, and the missing opening almost certainly read something like "Pick over grapes, remove from stems, and to each peck allow half a cup of water." Read together with the book's Currant Jelly directions, it is workable, but the quantities have to come from elsewhere.
- The missing halfEverything before "point" is gone, so no fruit quantity or added water is given. Grapes need only a little water in the bottom of the kettle to keep them from scorching before their own juice runs.
- "Proceed as for Currant Jelly"In this book that means draining the cooked mash through a jelly bag, measuring the juice, boiling it, then adding an equal measure of heated sugar and boiling until it jells. Consult the Currant Jelly entry itself for the timings; the reference is doing most of the work here.
- Thirty minutes is for extraction, not for jellyThe long boil is to break the skins down and release juice and pectin. The jelly itself sets in a fraction of that time once sugar is in; boiling the sweetened juice thirty minutes gives you a dark, caramel-flavoured syrup.
- Do not squeeze the bagThe hinge of any jelly. Pressing the pulp forces fine solids through and the jelly turns cloudy. Let it drip, however slowly, and use the leftover pulp for grape butter.
- Why wild grapesFox and riverbank grapes are high in acid and pectin and set firmly without commercial pectin, which is what the note is really claiming. Modern table grapes are bred for sugar and low acid and will not jell reliably on their own; slightly underripe Concords are the closest substitute.
- Tartrate crystalsGrape jelly often throws gritty crystals of potassium bitartrate. Letting the strained juice stand overnight in the refrigerator and pouring it off the sediment before boiling with sugar prevents most of it.
- SealingPeriod jelly recipes of this kind generally finished with glasses covered in paraffin, which is no longer considered a sound seal. Fill hot half-pint jars, leave a quarter inch of headspace, and process in a boiling water bath — current times are in any USDA or extension guide.
- YieldRoughly a cup of jelly per pound of grapes, depending on how patiently you let the bag drip.
Grape jelly of this kind was a fixture of the American preserving season long before it became a commercial product; the recipe assumes the cook has access to wild vines, which in New England and the Middle Atlantic states meant the fox grape and the riverbank grape scrambling over stone walls and fencerows. The arrangement here appears to follow a common cookbook method, in which Currant Jelly is written out in full as the pattern recipe and other fruits are handled more briefly by cross-reference. That economy is why so many entries in this section read as fragments when lifted out on their own. It also reflects a period in which jelly-making needed no explanation at all, only a note on which fruit gave the best result, and the compiler's verdict — wild grapes over cultivated — is the sort of judgement a household cook of the period would have taken for granted.