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Grape Conserve
2 pints grapes
2⅔ cups sugar
1 cup walnut-meats
2 oranges
1 cup seeded raisins
Wash, stem, and seed the grapes. Slice the oranges very thin, and add to the grapes. Add the raisins and sugar and cook until the mixture is transparent and thick. Add the chopped walnut-meats. Pack while hot in hot, clean jars and seal.
A straightforward late-Victorian style conserve: fruit, sugar, raisins and nuts cooked down to a thick, spreadable preserve. A few of the original's assumptions need spelling out.
- The sugar quantity"22/3 cups" is a printer's rendering of 2⅔ cups, roughly 19 oz or 530 g. It is not 22 or 23 cups.
- Two pints of grapesMeasured by volume, this is roughly 1½ lb of grapes, a little less once stemmed. The recipe gives no yield, but a batch of this size should fill about four half-pint jars.
- Which grapesThe recipe assumes a seeded American slip-skin grape, most likely Concord. It says simply to seed them; the usual period way of doing that was to pop the pulp from the skins, cook the pulp until the seeds loosened, sieve them out and return the skins to the pot. With modern seedless table grapes you can skip all of that and simply halve them, though the flavour is milder and the set weaker without the skins.
- The oranges go in wholeSliced thin means peel and all, which is where the bitterness and much of the pectin live. Simmer the slices in a little water until the peel is tender before the sugar goes in; once sugar is present the peel softens very little further and tends to stay leathery.
- "Transparent and thick"This is the doneness cue, and it is a good one. It corresponds to about 220F on a thermometer, or a spoonful that sheets off rather than dripping. At sea level allow 30-45 minutes of steady boiling; reduce the target by roughly 2F per 1,000 feet of elevation.
- Nuts last, and only justNuts last -- Walnuts stirred in at the end keep their colour and texture far better. Boiled with the fruit they go soft and grey and can turn faintly bitter.
- Sealing"Pack while hot and seal" is open-kettle canning, which relies on the hot jar alone to pull a vacuum. It is no longer considered reliable. Fill clean hot half-pint jars to ¼ inch of the rim and process 10 minutes in a boiling-water bath, or simply refrigerate the jars and use within a month.
- ServingA conserve of this kind is a condiment as much as a spread. It was and still is served with roast poultry, ham or cold meat as readily as on toast.
In the preserving vocabulary of this period a conserve was often distinguished from a jam or marmalade: it typically combined more than one fruit, and frequently included dried fruit or nuts, which tended to make it richer and more expensive than an everyday jam. Grape versions were a fixture of American autumn preserving because the Concord grape, generally traced to Ephraim Bull's selections in Massachusetts in the 1850s, ripened in quantity, grew on arbours in ordinary back gardens, and carried enough acid and pectin in its skins to set reliably without added commercial pectin, which was not sold to home cooks until the 1910s. The oranges and raisins mark the recipe as belonging to a moment when both had become familiar groceries, and the Butterick book treats a shelf of such jars as a matter of ordinary thrift rather than luxury.