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Chilled Grape-Juice
Wash purple grapes and boil under skin, pulp and seeds separate. Press through jelly-bag and to every pint of juice add serve one-half cup of sugar. Boil for twenty minutes, chill and with chipped ice.
The typographical setting of this entry has slipped — phrases have been transposed — but the method underneath is a standard stovetop grape juice. Read it as: boil the washed grapes until skin, pulp and seeds separate; press through a jelly bag; add half a cup of sugar to every pint of juice; boil twenty minutes; chill and serve with chipped ice.
- The grapes"Purple grapes" in an American book of this date most likely means Concord or a similar slip-skin native variety, which is what gives the juice its foxy aroma and deep colour. Seedless table grapes will work but give a thinner, flatter drink; as a rough guide, about 4 lb of fruit yields something near a quart of juice.
- Boil until the fruit breaksAdd a splash of water to the pan to keep the first grapes from scorching, then cook 10-15 minutes, crushing with a masher, until the skins slip and the pulp loosens from the seeds. Do not crack the seeds by processing the fruit in a blender — they carry a bitter tannin.
- The jelly-bagA doubled square of muslin or a jelly bag in a colander over a bowl. Let it drip rather than squeezing if you want a clear juice; squeezing gives more volume and a cloudy result, which matters little here since the drink is served over ice.
- SugarHalf a cup per pint is very sweet by present taste; that is a syrup ratio, and at this strength sugar would also have helped the juice keep. A quarter cup per pint is closer to modern grape juice, and ripe Concords often need less still.
- The second boilTwenty minutes of hard boiling will drive off much of the fresh grape aroma and thicken the juice toward syrup; the likely intention was keeping quality. If the juice is going into the refrigerator to be drunk within a few days, bring it just to a simmer to dissolve the sugar and take it off.
- Sediment after chillingChilled grape juice throws out a gritty deposit of potassium bitartrate — cream of tartar — within a day or two. Let it settle in the refrigerator overnight and pour the clear juice off the crystals, or strain again through a cloth.
- StorageNothing here is a canning procedure. Keep the finished juice covered in the refrigerator and use it within a week; it is not shelf-stable in a corked bottle in the pantry.
- Yield and servingRoughly a quart of sweetened juice from 4 lb of grapes, enough for six glasses over chipped ice. It also dilutes well with sparkling water, which suits the heavier sugar level of the original.
Unfermented grape juice as a bottled drink is generally traced to the temperance movement of the later nineteenth century, when it was promoted both as a household beverage and as a communion wine substitute; the Concord grape, raised in Concord, Massachusetts, and introduced commercially in the mid-1850s, became the American standard for it. By the time Butterick — a pattern and magazine company selling domestic advice alongside dress patterns — issued this collection, commercial grape juice was widely sold, but making it at home from a backyard arbour was still ordinary practice in grape-growing regions. The recipe sits among the other sugared summer drinks of the period — lemonades, fruit shrubs, ginger beers, iced teas — served with chipped ice, which in a household of this era meant ice broken by hand from a block in the icebox.