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Pickled Grapes
Select large but not ripe grapes, cut into small bunches, and fill a stone jar with them, putting vine leaves between the bunches. Dissolve one pound of bay salt and a little common salt in one quart of cold water, put it into a copper pan, boil and remove the scum as it rises to the top. When it has boiled for quarter of an hour, let it stand until cool. Pour the liquor over the grapes, put more vine leaves on the top, and tie down with a folded linen cloth. Boil two quarts of vinegar together with one quart of water and one pound of brown sugar for a few minutes, skim, and let it stand until quite cold; strain the grapes. Dry the jar, put fresh vine leaves at the bottom between the layers of the grapes and on the top, and pour the clear pickle over all. Tie a thin piece of board in a piece of flannel, lay it on the top of the jar, cover it with bladder and then with leather, and tie it down tightly.
A two-stage English-style fruit pickle: a heavy salt cure first, then a sweetened vinegar. Most of the work is waiting, and the vessel and seal are the parts that need rethinking.
- Do not use the copper panSalt brine and vinegar both attack copper, and the dissolved metal ends up in the pickle. Boil both liquors in stainless steel or another nonreactive pan.
- Bay saltBay salt is coarse solar-evaporated sea salt. Substitute plain coarse sea salt or kosher salt with no iodine or anti-caking agents, which cloud the brine.
- That brine is a cure, not a soakA pound of salt to a quart of water is at or past the saturation point, so not all of it will necessarily dissolve. The recipe gives no steeping time at all; judge the grapes by feel and drain them before they turn to salt.
- "Strain the grapes"This means drain off the salt liquor, not push them through anything. Rinse briefly in cold water and let them dry before they go back into the jar.
- Vine leavesThey are there for tannin, which keeps the skins firm, and they were free to anyone with a vine. Untreated grape or blackcurrant leaves work; brined vine leaves from a jar, rinsed, are the easy modern stand-in.
- Vinegar strengthTwo parts vinegar to one part water leaves roughly three per cent acidity, weaker than a modern pickle. Store the finished jars in the refrigerator rather than treating them as shelf-stable, and discard any that smell yeasty or grow mould.
- The sealThe board, flannel, bladder and leather are an era's answer to keeping air off the surface. Use a clean glass jar with a plastic-lined lid, and if you want the weight, a small food-safe disc that keeps the fruit under the liquor.
- Timing and yieldGive the finished pickle a couple of weeks before opening. The recipe states no yield: the liquor as written comes to over three quarts, and how many jars it fills depends entirely on how loosely the bunches and leaves pack.
- ServingThis belongs beside cold game, ham, terrines and hard cheese, in the same role as pickled walnuts or damsons, not on a cheeseboard as fresh fruit.
Pickled grapes of this kind belong to the English household preserving tradition, and recipes of the type appear in American cookbooks drawing on British manuals. The method is pre-canning: firm the fruit in strong salt, then hold it under sweetened vinegar, and exclude air with layers of board, flannel, bladder and leather rather than with heat. Vine leaves between the layers are the same trick used for pickled cucumbers, the tannin in the leaf helping the skins stay taut. Underripe grapes were also the source of verjuice, the sour grape juice used as an acid in cooking before lemons were cheap, so a household with a vine had every reason to pick fruit before it sweetened.