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Green-Grape Jelly
This is to be served only with meats and is of a most delicate color. If possible, use wild grapes; their flavor is much finer for this purpose than the cultivated varieties. Do not gather the grapes too green; and if a few are slightly turning it will do no harm. Look the fruit over carefully and wipe all that is dusty. Stew the grapes with the skins on, adding but little water, as the fruit is very rich in juice. Allow a pound and a half of sugar to every pint of juice. The jelly is of a light-green color and adds to the effect of the dinner-table.
A jelly built on underripe fruit, which is exactly the point: green grapes are at their peak for both pectin and acid, so no commercial pectin is wanted. The original assumes you know the rest of the jelly routine, so here is what it leaves out.
- Know your wild grapeIf you forage, be certain of the vine. Canada moonseed (Menispermum canadense) grows in the same hedgerows, carries similar blue-black fruit in similar clusters, and is poisonous. Grapes have tendrils, shreddy bark and multiple pip-shaped seeds; moonseed has none of the first two and a single crescent seed.
- Why green fruitPectin and acid are generally higher in slightly underripe fruit and fall as grapes ripen, so such fruit tends to set on its own. The recipe itself gives colour as its reason, and only warns against gathering the grapes too green, allowing a few that are turning.
- The sugar ratio is heavyA pound and a half of sugar to a pint of juice works out to about 12 oz per cup. Many modern no-added-pectin jelly recipes use rather less, nearer 7 to 8 oz of sugar per cup of juice. The old proportion sets hard and keeps well but tastes markedly sweeter; reducing it will give a softer, more tart jelly and a smaller yield.
- StrainingAfter stewing, drip the crushed fruit through a scalded jelly bag or several layers of damp muslin and do not squeeze it. Pressing forces pulp through and the "delicate color" the recipe is after turns cloudy.
- The set pointNo time is given because none can be. Boil the juice and sugar hard and test: 220F at sea level, or two drops running together off the side of a cold spoon into a sheet. Subtract about 2F per 1,000 feet of elevation.
- Tartaric crystalsWild grapes throw a lot of tartrate. Letting the strained juice stand cold overnight and pouring it off the sediment prevents gritty crystals in the finished jars.
- SealingJelly of this period was commonly sealed with paraffin in tumblers, a method no longer recommended; the recipe itself says nothing about sealing. Fill sterilised half-pint jars, leave a quarter-inch headspace, and process five to ten minutes in a boiling-water bath, or skip processing and keep the jars in the refrigerator.
- YieldRoughly 4 lb of grapes gives about a quart of juice, which with this sugar ratio makes something in the region of five half-pint jars.
Green-grape jelly belongs to the long European habit of cooking with unripe fruit — the same instinct that produced verjuice, the sour green-grape juice used as a souring agent in medieval and early modern kitchens before lemons were cheap. By the time this book appeared, verjuice itself had largely gone from American cooking, but the tart green grape survived in the preserve cupboard as a condiment for meat, the role a mint or currant jelly plays. The preference stated here for wild grapes over cultivated ones is telling: American vines such as the riverbank and frost grapes were still free for the gathering across much of the country, and their higher acid gave a firmer set and a sharper flavor than the Concords and table grapes of the market. The closing note about the effect on the dinner-table is a reminder that this was a book written for a household concerned with how a meal looked as much as how it tasted; a pale green jelly beside a roast was a deliberate touch of color in an era of set courses and matched service.