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Spiced Grapes
Five pounds of grapes; four pounds of sugar; one pint of vinegar; one tablespoon of cloves; one tablespoon of allspice; one tablespoon of cinnamon; one-half tablespoon of mace. Pulp the grapes, place the pulp on the fire, and heat slowly, cooking about five minutes. Turn the fruit into a coarse sieve, and press the pulp through, thus separating the seeds from the grapes. Place the skins with this pulp, weigh the whole, and make the same as the spiced currants.
A classic slip-skin grape preserve: the pulp is cooked and sieved to remove the seeds, then reunited with the skins and simmered down with sugar, vinegar and sweet spices. Two things the original assumes without saying are the grape variety and the method it cross-references.
- The grapes must be slip-skin"Pulp the grapes" means squeezing each grape so the green pulp pops out of its skin, which only works with American slip-skin varieties such as Concord, Catawba or Niagara. Seedless table grapes will not separate this way and have no skins worth keeping.
- The missing methodThe recipe leans on a 'spiced currants' recipe not given here, so the procedure has to be inferred: combine the fruit with the sugar, vinegar and spices and simmer, stirring often, until thick and jammy. Timing will depend on the fruit, so judge by consistency rather than the clock. Use a non-reactive pan; aluminum and bare cast iron will react with the vinegar and darken the fruit.
- Weigh after seedingThe instruction to weigh the skins and sieved pulp together is presumably so the proportions of the spiced currants recipe can be applied to the actual weight of fruit, which will be a little under the original five pounds once the seeds are gone. As listed, the recipe works out at roughly four parts sugar to five parts fruit by weight.
- The spicesA tablespoon each of cloves, allspice and cinnamon reads as ground spice, which will cloud the preserve. Whole spices tied in a square of cheesecloth and lifted out at the end give a cleaner result; whole spice is less potent by volume, so a little more will be wanted.
- MaceMace is the lacy aril around the nutmeg seed nut itself. It is still sold ground and as blades; half a tablespoon ground is assertive, and blades in the spice bag are gentler.
- Don't overcook the pulpThe first five-minute heating is only to loosen the pulp for sieving. Push it through while hot once it cools the pulp sets and clings to the seeds.
- Yield and keepingExpect roughly four to five pints. The book gives no processing instructions; current practice is to fill hot sterilized jars and process in a boiling-water bath according to an up-to-date guide, or simply refrigerate and use within a few weeks.
- ServingThis is a condiment, not a jam. It belongs beside roast pork, ham, duck or cold meats, in the same role as cranberry sauce.
Spiced fruits sat in the same part of the nineteenth-century American table as chutney did in the British one: sweet, sharp, heavily spiced preserves put up in autumn and set out beside roast and cold meats all winter. Grapes joined currants, plums, peaches and pears in this category as the Concord grape, introduced in Massachusetts in the mid-nineteenth century, spread through northern gardens and produced far more fruit than any household could eat fresh. The two-stage handling here cooking and sieving the pulp for its seeds, then returning the skins is particular to slip-skin varieties, whose tough, intensely flavored skins carry most of the color and are too good to discard. The Butterick company, better known for dress patterns, published its cook book for the same audience of practical housekeepers.