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Preserved Grapes
Select grapes that are ripe and quite sound. Pick off the stalks and weigh the fruit and to every pound of grapes allow one pound of sugar. Squeeze the pulp out of the skins, putting the pulp in one bowl and the skins in another. Put the sugar into a preserving-pan with one breakfast cupful of water to each pound, and let it boil until clear, removing the scum as it rises. When it is quite clear put the pulp of the grapes into it and boil for two minutes; then turn it out into a hair-sieve and rub it through with the back of a wooden spoon to get the pips out. Put it back into the preserving-pan without the pips, add the skins and boil for two or three minutes, or until the skins fill and look plump; then let it cool and put it into jars and cover them to keep out the air.
A slip-skin grape preserve of the old English type, written in ounces of habit rather than instruction. Two things decide whether it works: the variety of grape and how long you let the syrup boil.
- Use slip-skin grapesThe whole method depends on grapes whose skins separate cleanly from the pulp when squeezed — Concord, Niagara, Catawba, muscadine. European table grapes such as Thompson Seedless or red globe will not slip, and there is nothing to separate.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is roughly 8 to 10 fluid ounces; one cup of water per pound of sugar is the sensible reading. The syrup is boiled until clear, with the scum taken off as it rises, before the fruit goes in.
- Hair sieveA fine-mesh stainless or nylon sieve does the same work. A food mill with the coarse plate is faster and gets more pulp off the pips.
- Preserving-panA wide, heavy pan — stainless or enamelled cast iron. Aluminium can react with acid fruit and leave a metallic taste; untinned copper and brass pans were the traditional preserving vessels, though non-reactive metal is the safer modern choice. Width matters more than depth for evaporation.
- The short boils are deliberateThe boils are short -- Two minutes on the pulp, and the skins only long enough to swell and look plump, as the recipe specifies. Skins given a hard boil are said to turn leathery and stay so in the jar.
- It will not be stiffAs written this is likely to finish as a loose preserve or thick syrup with skins suspended in it rather than a firm jelly. For a firmer set, boiling the combined mixture to around 220°F before the final cooling may do it, though how well it gels will depend on the grapes and how ripe they are.
- Filling and keepingCooling before jarring and simply covering "to keep out the air" was adequate in a cold larder and is not adequate now. Treat the result as a refrigerator preserve and use it within a few weeks, or follow a current tested water-bath process if you want it shelf-stable.
- YieldThe recipe names no quantity of fruit. As a rough guide, two pounds of grapes with two pounds of sugar will fill several half-pint jars, depending on how far the syrup is reduced.
Oscar Tschirky's book gathers hotel cookery alongside a long tail of domestic preserving, and this entry is plainly from the second tradition: "breakfast cupful" and "hair-sieve" are the vocabulary of household manuals rather than of the Waldorf's copper-lined kitchens. What makes it American in practice is the grape. The slip-skin varieties the method requires are native to North America, and the Concord — raised by Ephraim Bull in Concord, Massachusetts, and introduced in the 1850s — had by Oscar's day become the default grape of eastern gardens and market stalls, cheap in September and well suited to a preserve that asks you to pull skin from pulp with your fingers. Separating the two, cooking them briefly and apart, then reuniting them was one way of getting the flavour of the pulp and the colour and body of the skins without the pips, at a time when equal weights of fruit and sugar were a common proportion in preserving.