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Unfermented Grape Juice
10 lbs. grapes 1 cup water 3 lbs. sugar Put grapes and water in granite stew-pan. Heat until stones and pulp separate; then strain through jelly-bag, add sugar, heat to boiling-point, and bottle. This will PUNCH SERVICE. - Page 43.
CLARET CUP SERVICE. - Page 45.
DOUBLE LOAVES OF MILK AND WATER BREAD. - Page 54.
BOSTON BROWN BREAD. - Page 57,
A straightforward hot-extraction grape juice, printed here with its yield sentence broken off mid-line by a stray run of caption text from the illustration list. A few of the instructions assume equipment and storage habits that no longer apply.
- Granite stew-panGranite ware is enamelled steel, valued because it does not react with acid. Use stainless steel or enamelled cast iron; grape juice will pick up a metallic taste from bare aluminium or copper.
- "Stones"The seeds. The recipe gives no temperature or time; in modern practice this means bringing the crushed fruit to a bare simmer and holding it until the skins slip and the flesh breaks down. A hard boil is generally thought to coarsen the flavour.
- The grapesProbably Concord or a similar slip-skin American grape, the sort commonly grown in New England kitchen gardens in this period. Table grapes from a supermarket give a thinner, less aromatic juice; look for Concord in early autumn.
- StrainingLet the jelly bag drip rather than squeezing it. Pressed pulp clouds the juice and carries through bitterness from the seeds.
- TartratesGrape juice throws a gritty sediment of potassium bitartrate as it cools. Chill the strained juice overnight and pour it off the crystals before bottling, or the finished bottles will be sandy.
- SugarThree pounds to a batch this size is Victorian sweetness, working out to roughly one cup of sugar for every two cups of juice. Half a pound to a pound is enough for a modern palate, and ripe Concords need almost none.
- BottlingHot-filling into bottles was the whole of the preservation method here, with no processing time given. Grape juice is acidic enough that the practical risk is spoilage and refermentation rather than botulism, but wild yeast in an unsterilised bottle will build pressure and eventually burst it. Refrigerate and use within a week, freeze it, or follow a current tested canning process for fruit juice.
- YieldThe sentence beginning "This will" is broken off by the stray caption text, so what it went on to promise is unknown. Ten pounds of grapes will give roughly two and a half to three quarts of strained juice.
Unfermented grape juice was a product of the temperance movement as much as of the kitchen. Pasteurised grape juice is generally credited to Thomas Bramwell Welch, a New Jersey dentist and Methodist who in 1869 bottled boiled Concord juice as an unfermented communion wine; the commercial product spread beyond church use over the following decades. That is why a recipe like this sits in a cookbook that elsewhere gives directions for punch and claret cup: the same book served families who drank and families who did not. Readers would also have understood it as a way to use a garden arbour's worth of Concords, a grape developed in Massachusetts around 1850 and widely planted in New England thereafter.