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Fresh Grapes
Thoroughly wash in cold water one and a half pounds grapes, drain, place in a compotier and serve.
A service instruction rather than a cooked dish, but the details are worth knowing: everything here rests on the vessel, the temperature and the fact that grapes were sold on the bunch and eaten at table with a knife or scissors.
- CompotierA footed glass or porcelain dish for fruit and compotes. Any raised bowl works.
- Quantity and yieldA pound and a half of grapes is enough for six to eight as dessert fruit, a small bunch each. The recipe itself gives no yield and does not say whether whole bunches or loose berries are meant.
- Washing and dryingCold water only, and drain thoroughly. Grapes left wet look dull and pool water in the dish; a period cook would have spread them on a napkin. Modern table grapes carry a waxy bloom and often a surface residue, so the wash is not decorative.
- Chill, then serveThe recipe says nothing about temperature. If you do chill them, an hour in the refrigerator is enough; very cold fruit loses aroma and tastes flatly sweet.
- Grape scissorsGrape scissors were part of period table service, used to snip a cluster without dismembering the bunch by hand, though this recipe does not mention them. A pair of kitchen shears in the bowl does the same job.
- What the grapes wereLikely candidates at this date include American slip-skin varieties such as Concord, eaten by pressing the pulp from the skin, and imported vinifera grapes such as Malaga, which are not slip-skin. Modern seedless table grapes need no such handling.
Fruit served plain, with nothing done to it, occupies a real place in books of this vintage because dessert in the formal French service meant fresh fruit, nuts and sweetmeats brought to the table after the sweet course, arranged rather than cooked. Filippini's International Cook Book catalogues these arrangements alongside elaborate entrees, giving for each the weight to buy, the dish to use, the state the fruit should arrive in. Grapes were among the more prestigious of these, since hothouse and imported bunches packed in cork dust were a familiar luxury in American cities — carried through the winter when little other fresh fruit did. The entry reads as an anticlimax now, but it is a reminder that the last course of a formal dinner was a display, and that the cook was held responsible for it.