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Grape Jelly
Prepare fruit and rub through a sieve; to every pound of pulp add a pound of sugar, stir well together, boil slowly twenty minutes, then follow general directions; or, prepare the juice, boil twenty minutes, and add one pound of sugar to one pound of juice after it is reduced by boiling; then boil ten or fifteen minutes. Or put on grapes just beginning to turn, boil, place in jelly-bag and let drain; to one pint juice add one pint sugar, boil twenty minutes, and just before it is done add one tea-spoon dissolved gum-arabic. -Mrs. W. M.
Three methods in one entry: a sieved pulp preserve, a juice jelly, and an underripe-grape jelly finished with gum arabic. The third is the one worth following, because grapes just turning color carry the most pectin.
- The hinge: pick underripe fruitGrapes at full ripeness have lost much of their pectin and acid, which is why the first two methods rely on long boiling and a heavy hand with sugar. The third method's "grapes just beginning to turn" is the reason it sets cleanly; a mix of about one part underripe to three parts ripe gives both set and flavor.
- "A pound of sugar to a pound of juice"Weight for weight, not cup for cup. A pint of grape juice weighs roughly a pound, and a pint of granulated sugar about 14 oz, so the "pint to a pint" in the third method is slightly less sugar than the earlier ratios.
- Gum-arabicAcacia gum, sold today as a powder in baking and cocktail supply shops. A teaspoon dissolved in a little hot water was added for body in an era before commercial pectin. It is optional and does nothing for the set; leave it out if you would rather not source it.
- Don't squeeze the bagLet the jelly-bag drain by gravity, however slow. Pressing or wringing forces pulp and fine sediment through and gives cloudy jelly, which no later boiling will clear.
- Judge by temperature, not the clockTwenty minutes is a rough guide that depends entirely on your pan and batch size. Cook to 220F at sea level (8F above the boiling point of water where you live), or until a spoonful sheets off the edge of a cold spoon rather than dripping.
- Sieved pulp is jam, not jellyThe first method produces a thick grape butter or conserve. Concord-type grapes have tough skins and slip-skin flesh; blanch briefly, then press the hot fruit through a food mill before the fine sieve or you will spend a long while at it.
- Tartrate crystalsGrape juice throws gritty crystals of cream of tartar. Refrigerating the strained juice overnight and decanting off the clear liquid before boiling prevents the sandy texture that plagues homemade grape jelly.
- "Follow general directions" means sealing"Follow general directions" -- This presumably points back to the book's general jelly directions, including sealing. Fill sterilized half-pint jars to a quarter inch of the top, wipe the rims, and process 5 to 10 minutes in a boiling water bath; refrigerate anything you don't process. Older practice sealed jelly under a layer of paraffin, which is no longer recommended because the wax shrinks and admits mold.
- YieldExpect roughly four to five half-pint jars from about 4 lb of grapes, depending on how far you reduce the juice.
Grape jelly was a farm and garden product long before it was a supermarket one, and *The Dixie Cook Book*'s three variations show a kitchen working without standardized pectin: the cook either boiled hard and long, leaned on underripe fruit for its natural set, or reached for gum arabic. Bottled fruit pectin did not reach American home cooks until the second decade of the twentieth century, so nineteenth-century jelly-making was a matter of judging fruit ripeness and reading a spoonful of syrup off the edge of a cold plate. The grape itself would most often have been a native American slip-skin variety of the Concord type, which flourished in the East and South where European wine grapes failed, and whose flavor is distinctly musky. The initialed attribution -- "Mrs. W. M." -- is typical of the compiled community cookbooks of the period, where recipes were gathered from local contributors, though such volumes, this one included, generally appeared under a named editor.