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Grape Catchup
4 pounds grapes
2 teaspoons cloves
2 pounds sugar
2 teaspoons allspice
1 pint vinegar
2 tablespoons cinnamon
Wash the grapes and remove them from the stems. Place them in a pan and steam them without water, until they are soft. Put the fruit through a sieve, add the other ingredients, and simmer the mixture for twenty minutes. Seal it in clean, hot jars.
A slip-skin grape sauce of the sweet-sour type that once stood beside roast meat and game. The recipe assumes Concord-style grapes and a cook who knows how thick catchup should be.
- Use Concord or other slip-skin grapesThe instruction to steam without water and then sieve only works with grapes whose pulp separates from the skin and whose seeds are large enough to be caught. Thick-skinned table grapes give a thin, dull result.
- A pint is two cupsUse cider or white vinegar at 5 percent acidity, which is the modern standard strength; the strength of the vinegar the book assumed is not stated and cannot be known. Do not substitute a low-acid or diluted vinegar here, since the acid is what keeps the sauce.
- Ground or whole spice is not statedTwo tablespoons of cinnamon and two teaspoons each of cloves and allspice read as very heavy if ground and reasonable if whole or broken. Whole spices tied in cloth, then lifted out before jarring, give the cleaner result; if using ground, start with about a third and taste.
- Steam means steamNo water goes in the pan. Cover it and set it over low heat so the grapes collapse in their own juice, about 10 to 15 minutes, stirring so the bottom layer does not scorch before the top releases liquid.
- SievingA food mill or a chinois with a ladle does in minutes what a colander and spoon do in twenty. Push through everything but skins and seeds; the pulp is where the body comes from.
- Twenty minutes may not be enoughCook until the sauce mounds slightly on a cold spoon and a spatula drawn through the pan leaves a brief clear track. Depending on how juicy the grapes were, that can take 30 to 45 minutes. Stir often once it thickens, as sugared fruit purée catches easily.
- SealingSealing hot in hot jars was standard practice when this book was written and is no longer considered adequate on its own. Treat what you make as a refrigerator condiment, good for a few weeks, or follow current tested processing directions for a high-acid fruit sauce if you intend to store it on a shelf.
- YieldFour pounds of grapes with two pounds of sugar and a pint of vinegar will make somewhere in the region of five or six cups, depending on how far the mixture is reduced.
Fruit catchups were the older and broader family; tomato was only one member of it, and through the nineteenth century American cookbooks carry catchups of mushroom, walnut, currant, gooseberry, plum and grape. The fruit ones share an idea: a strained purée sharpened with vinegar, sweetened, and spiced with the warm baking spices, meant to be spooned beside roast or cold meat rather than used as a dip; the mushroom and walnut sorts are thin, savoury and unsweetened rather than purées. Grape versions belong to the Concord era, after that slip-skin American grape spread through eastern gardens in the second half of the century and gave home cooks more fruit than they could eat fresh. The Butterick book was published by a pattern company for a readership of home sewers and housekeepers, and the recipe belongs to the autumn preserving work, when a heavy vine had to be turned into something that would keep.