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Jellied Grapes
Mrs. A. M. Lewis.
A very delicate dish is made of one-third of a cup of rice, two cups of grapes, half a cup of water, and two spoons of sugar. Sprinkle the rice and sugar among the grapes, while placing them in a deep dish; pour on the water, cover close and simmer two hours slowly in the oven. Serve cream as sauce, or cold as pudding, If served warm as pudding, increase slightly the proportion of rice and sugar.
A slow-baked grape and rice pudding that relies almost entirely on the fruit's own juice for liquid. The proportions are small — this is a dish for two or three, not a family.
- "Simmer slowly in the oven"Wood and coal ranges had no thermostat, and the recipe gives no oven term at all beyond "slowly." A low oven, somewhere around 275-300F, is a reasonable modern reading. Bake covered for the full two hours, checking at the ninety-minute mark that the rice is tender and the dish has not gone dry.
- The grapes matterThe likely fruit here is an American slip-skin grape — Concord, Isabella, Catawba — tart, thick-skinned, seeded, and generous with juice. Modern seedless table grapes are sweeter and less acid, so go carefully on the sugar and be ready to add a little more water.
- SeedsIf you use Concords, the seeds stay in unless you halve and pick them out. The original assumes diners will deal with them, as they did with fruit stones generally. Either seed the grapes first or warn whoever is eating.
- "Two spoons of sugar"Unspecified, but in a book of this period a bare "spoon" in a sweet dish usually means a tablespoon. Two tablespoons for two cups of tart grapes is modest; taste and adjust to the fruit.
- RiceA third of a cup of raw rice to two cups of grapes plus half a cup of water is a tight ratio. Use short or medium grain, which absorbs slowly and holds together; long grain will stay separate and the dish will not set into anything jellied.
- Cover it properlyThe whole method is steaming in a sealed dish. A lid that fits, or foil crimped tight, is what keeps the rice cooking; an open dish will dry to a scorched crust well before two hours.
- Yield and servingRoughly two to three small servings. Served warm it eats as a pudding with cream; chilled it thickens as it cools, which is presumably the "jellied" of the title.
- The warm-pudding variation"Increase slightly the proportion of rice and sugar" is vague; a modest bump — say a scant half cup of rice and an extra spoon of sugar — is in keeping with "slightly." You may need a little more water to compensate for the extra starch.
Grape puddings of this sort are generally associated with the American grape belt — western New York, Ohio, Ontario are the regions usually named — where Concord and its relatives were planted heavily from the 1850s onward and produced far more fruit each September than any household could eat fresh. Rice was a cheap thickener, and baking fruit slowly with a handful of grain is often said to have been a way to stretch a bowl of it into a dish for the table. The name is loose: nothing is jellied in the gelatin sense, but slip-skin grapes are high in pectin, and a cooled dish of them sets on its own. The Home Cook Book, first issued in Toronto in the 1870s and compiled from contributions by named local women, is full of these small attributed dishes, of which the attribution to Mrs. A. M. Lewis is one — a printed roll call of the neighbourhood's cooks.