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Spiced Grapes
Five pounds grapes, three of sugar, two tea-spoons cinnamon and allspice, half tea-spoon cloves; pulp grapes, boil skins until tender, cook pulps and strain through a sieve, add it to the skins, put in sugar, spices and vinegar to taste; boil thoroughly and cool. -Miss Mae Stokes, Milford Center.
A spiced grape conserve in the sweet-pickle mould: fruit, sugar, warm spices and vinegar cooked down until thick. The method assumes a slip-skin grape and a cook who will taste as she goes.
- Use a slip-skin grapeThe whole technique depends on grapes whose skins pop free of the pulp under thumb pressure — Concord, Catawba, Niagara and their kin. Modern seedless table grapes will not separate and cannot be made to work this way.
- Why skins and pulp go separate waysThe skins carry the colour and most of the flavour but stay tough, so they get the long boil; the pulp holds the seeds, so it is cooked soft and pushed through a sieve to leave them behind. Skipping the sieve leaves you with seeds throughout.
- The vinegar, unmeasured"Vinegar to taste" is genuinely open. Cider vinegar is the period default; a cup to a cup and a half for this quantity of fruit gives a recognisable sweet pickle, but add it in stages and taste, since the sugar blunts the acid considerably when hot.
- SpicesGround cinnamon, allspice and cloves, stirred in as written, will cloud the preserve slightly. Whole spices tied in cloth and fished out at the end give a cleaner-looking result, though the flavour will be somewhat gentler.
- How thick is "boil thoroughly"Cook until a spoonful dropped on a cold plate mounds rather than runs — roughly the consistency of a loose jam. This may take half an hour or more of open boiling after the sugar goes in, with steady stirring toward the end, as this mixture scorches readily.
- StorageThe recipe stops at "cool" and gives no sealing or processing instructions at all. Treat what you make as a refrigerator preserve, good for a few weeks, and do not assume the sugar and vinegar alone make it shelf-stable; for pantry storage follow a current tested water-bath canning procedure.
- YieldFive pounds of grapes with three of sugar reduces to a few pints, depending on how far it is boiled down. It is a condiment for roast pork, ham or cold fowl, served by the spoonful.
Sweet pickles — fruit cooked with sugar, vinegar and warm spices — occupied a whole chapter in nineteenth-century American cookbooks, sitting between the preserves and the relishes and answering the same need as chutney did in British kitchens: something sharp and sweet to cut through salt pork, ham and cold roast meat through the winter. Grapes were an obvious candidate in the 1880s Midwest, where the Concord, generally credited to Ephraim Bull of Massachusetts around mid-century, had spread fast as a hardy, heavy-bearing dooryard vine. Its slip skin, a nuisance for eating out of hand, is exactly what makes this two-part method possible. The attribution to Miss Mae Stokes of Milford Center, an Ohio village, is a reminder that The Dixie Cook Book, despite its title and its Southern framing, was assembled largely from contributed recipes gathered across the Midwest — a common publishing practice of the era, in which a regional name sold a book whose contents came from wherever the compilers could collect them.