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Venison Jelly
1 peck wild grapes 1 quart vinegar Whole cloves 1/4 cup Stick cinnamon 6 pounds sugar } each Put first four ingredients into a preserving kettle, heat slowly to the boiling-point, and cook until grapes are soft. Strain through a double thickness of cheese-cloth or a jelly bag, and boil liquid twenty minutes; then add sugar heated, and boil five minutes. Turn into glasses.
This is a spiced grape jelly meant to be eaten with venison, not made from it. The ingredient list as printed is a bracketed table that collapsed into a single line: 1 peck wild grapes, 1 quart vinegar, 1/4 cup whole cloves and 1/4 cup stick cinnamon, and 6 pounds sugar.
- A peck of grapesA peck is 8 dry quarts, roughly 12 to 14 pounds of grapes on the stem. This is a full-day batch that will fill a large stockpot; halving or quartering it in proportion works without trouble.
- The spice is not a typoThe bracketed "each" in the original does appear to give a quarter cup of whole cloves and a quarter cup of stick cinnamon, which is a great deal even for a batch this size. Tie the spices in cheesecloth so they can be lifted out before straining.
- Wild grapesFox and frost grapes are more acidic and higher in pectin than table grapes, which is likely why no added pectin appears here. Concords will generally set on their own, especially picked slightly underripe; low-acid table grapes such as Thompson are unlikely to gel without help.
- Preserving kettleAny wide, heavy, non-reactive pot — stainless or enamelled. The vinegar rules out bare copper, aluminium and cast iron, which will pick up metallic flavour and dull the colour.
- Do not squeeze the bagLet the juice drip through the jelly bag on its own. Forcing it pushes pulp through and gives cloudy jelly.
- Judging the setThe stated twenty minutes plus five is a guide, not a rule; it depends on your grapes. Test on a cold plate, or take the boiling jelly to 220°F (8°F above the boiling point of water where you live). "Sugar heated" means warmed in a low oven so it dissolves without dropping the temperature.
- Sealing"Turn into glasses" meant tumblers topped with melted paraffin. Use half-pint canning jars instead and process them in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes; paraffin seals are no longer considered reliable against mould.
- YieldThe full quantity makes a large amount: 6 pounds of sugar plus the juice from a peck of grapes will fill well more than a dozen half-pints, depending on how much juice the grapes give up.
Sweet-sharp fruit jellies served alongside game are an old European inheritance that American cookbooks absorbed wholesale — redcurrant with mutton, crab apple or wild grape with venison. The vinegar and the heavy hand with clove and cinnamon mark this as a descendant of the spiced fruit "sauces" of much earlier English cookery, where acid and spice were expected to cut the richness and gaminess of dark meat. Such a recipe is often placed among the fruit and preserve recipes rather than the meat chapters because it is a pantry item, put up in autumn when wild grapes ripen along fence lines and stream banks, and held for the winter table. Its presence in a Boston school text is a reminder that a well-stocked household expected to make its own accompaniments rather than buy them.