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Grape Jam
Take the required quantity of ripe grapes, remove the stalks, and wipe them with a damp cloth to free them of any impurities, then put them into a preserving-pan, and stew over a gentle fire until reduced to a soft pulp. Pass the pulp through a fine hair-sieve, weigh it, and return it to the preserving-pan with an equal quantity of coarsely-crushed loaf sugar. Stir the jam over the fire, and boil it for about twenty minutes longer. When ready, turn the jam into jars, leave it until cold, then put in each jar a round of brandied paper, cover them with parchment, and tie down. Keep in a dry cupboard.
A pulp-and-equal-weight-sugar jam of the old English school, written for a cook who owns scales. The only real decisions are which grapes and when to stop boiling.
- Weigh, don't measureThe whole recipe hinges on weighing the sieved pulp and matching it with the same weight of sugar. Volume measures will not do it; the sugar-to-fruit ratio is what makes the jam keep.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in a hard cone, broken and crushed for use. Ordinary granulated white sugar is the direct equivalent, weight for weight.
- Grapes to useSlip-skin varieties such as Concord give the classic dark, musky jam and are what this method suits, since skins and seeds are removed at the sieve. Seedless table grapes work but taste flat by comparison.
- Hair sieveA fine horsehair sieve; a nylon drum sieve, a food mill on its finest plate, or a conical strainer worked with a ladle all do the same job. Avoid pressing so hard that seed fragments go through, as crushed grape seeds are bitter.
- Preserving-panWide and heavy; preserving pans of the period were commonly unlined copper or brass. Use a wide stainless or enamelled pan; grape acid will react with bare aluminium or cast iron and dull the colour.
- The twenty minutesTreat it as a guide and test instead. Jam is set at about 220F, or when a spoonful chilled on a cold saucer wrinkles when pushed. Grape pulp is thick and scorches easily, so stir down to the bottom of the pan throughout.
- Brandied paper and parchmentA disc of paper dipped in brandy laid on the hot surface, then a parchment cover tied with string. It suppresses surface mould but is not a seal. Current practice is to fill sterilised jars, seal with two-piece lids and water-bath process, or simply keep the jam refrigerated and use it within a few weeks.
- YieldAbout 4 lb of grapes gives roughly 2 lb of sieved pulp, which with its equal weight of sugar makes something in the region of 3 to 3 1/2 lb of finished jam.
Grape jam sits in the long English preserving tradition that American hotel kitchens inherited wholesale: fruit reduced to pulp, sieved, then boiled pound for pound with refined sugar, the ratio itself doing the preserving work. The brandied paper cover is the tell of an older era, before reliable vacuum-sealing lids, when a spirit-soaked disc pressed onto the hot surface was the standard defence against mould. Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms rather than its stoves, and his 1896 book collects the working repertoire of a large hotel kitchen, including a full battery of preserves made in season and held in the storeroom. American grape cookery of the period leaned heavily on the Concord, developed in Massachusetts in the mid-nineteenth century and by the 1890s the dominant grape of Eastern jams, jellies and juice.