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Canned Grapes
Squeeze pulp from grapes, boil skins and pulp in water until each seem tender; then pass pulp through a sieve, add skins and the water in which they are cooked (only a little water should be used in cooking them); add a large coffee-cup of white sugar to a quart of grapes, boil until quite thick, and can in glass according to general directions. Mrs. A. C. B., Jacksonville.
The cooking method here is sound old-fashioned grape preserving, but the preservation step is not: the recipe hands the whole question of sealing and processing off to "general directions" that no longer meet current standards. The notes below explain the units and the specific failure point.
- Why it fails as writtenNothing on this page gives a jar sterilisation step, a headspace, a boiling-water-bath time or a temperature; the whole sealing and processing question is deferred to "general directions" printed elsewhere. As reproduced, nothing in the procedure guarantees the seal or the destruction of surface yeasts and moulds carried in on the fruit and the jar rim.
- The missing "general directions"In 1880s household books this phrase pointed to a separate chapter of canning instructions. Reproduced on its own, the recipe is incomplete: the part that actually did the preserving is not on the page. A current tested recipe should be used for any grape preserve intended for storage.
- Spoilage, not botulismGrapes are high-acid fruit, so Clostridium botulinum is not the concern here. The realistic outcomes are mould growth, alcoholic fermentation from wild yeasts and a lid that lifts in the cupboard — and mould on a sugar preserve can be deeper than the visible fuzz.
- A large coffee-cupPeriod coffee cups ran small by modern mug standards; a "large coffee-cup" is usually read as about one cup, 200-225 g of sugar, to a quart of grapes. That is a low-sugar preserve by 19th-century standards, which is part of why it depended on a reliable seal.
- A quart of grapesMeasured as whole fruit by volume, not weight — roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb of slip-skin grapes. The procedure implies a slip-skin American grape of the Concord type, whose skins separate cleanly from the pulp; seedless table grapes will not behave this way.
- Why the skins are cooked separatelyThe handling of skins and pulp -- Squeezing the pulp free of the skins and sieving it to remove the seeds is standard handling for slip-skin grapes; the seeds are bitter and gritty, and the skins are cooked in very little water and then reunited with the sieved pulp.
The Dixie Cook-Book belongs to the great wave of American compiled household manuals of the 1880s, assembled from contributions signed with initials and a town — here Mrs. A. C. B. of Jacksonville. The grape being described is almost certainly a native slip-skin American variety of the Concord type, whose thick separable skin and seedy pulp explain the whole procedure: European wine grapes do not divide so obligingly. Because these grapes ripen all at once in September and keep badly, sieving and boiling down the crop with sugar was the standard way to carry the harvest into winter, and similar instructions appear in other regional cookbooks of the period. What the recipe assumes, and what no longer holds, is a cook who understood her own jars — the science of measured processing times arrived only with the agricultural extension bulletins of the following century.