Home › Sweet and Spiced Pickles › Grape Conserve
Grape Conserve
Five pounds grapes, not very ripe; green ones are best; five pounds sugar, five oranges, two pounds raisins. Chop orange peel coarsely and cover with cold water. Put on range and let it come to a boil; then strain all water off. Put the peel and juice of the oranges in a kettle with the grapes, sugar and raisins chopped and seeded. Boil twenty minutes and put in jelly glasses.
A straightforward late-Victorian conserve — grapes, citrus and raisins boiled down to a thick spread. Two things in the original need attention: the grapes are meant to be underripe for pectin and acid, and the sealing instruction stops short of anything a modern cook should rely on.
- Underripe grapes are the pointSlightly green grapes carry far more pectin and acid than fully ripe ones, which is what lets a twenty-minute boil set at all. Fully ripe fruit will give you a loose syrup rather than a conserve.
- Which grapesThe recipe names no variety, but an American book of this date most likely had slip-skin grapes such as Concord in mind: they separate easily from their skins and carry seeds. Seedless table grapes will work but produce a milder, flatter preserve; with Concords the common modern approach is to squeeze out the pulp, cook and sieve it to remove seeds, then return it to the skins.
- Seeded raisins"Raisins chopped and seeded" dates from before seedless varieties dominated. Ordinary supermarket raisins today are seedless; just chop them.
- Blanching the peelThe cold-water start, boil, and complete drain is there to pull bitterness out of the pith. Do not skip it, and use only the peel, not thick white pith, cut coarsely so it stays as recognizable strips in the finished conserve.
- Judging the twenty minutesTwenty minutes at a hard boil is a guide, not a rule — pan width and fruit ripeness change it a great deal. Test on a chilled saucer or take it to about 220F, and expect anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes.
- "Jelly glasses" and sealingGlasses of this kind were filled hot and topped with melted paraffin wax, a method now considered unreliable because the seal cracks and admits mould. Use standard canning jars and a boiling-water bath, or simply refrigerate the filled jars and use within a few weeks.
Conserves sit between jam and mincemeat: fruit boiled with sugar but bulked out with dried fruit, citrus and often nuts, meant for the tea table or to be eaten alongside meat rather than spread on toast. Grape conserve of this type was a September fixture in the grape-growing states, where Concord and Catawba vines cropped heavily and the last underripe bunches were worth using precisely because they set well. The instruction to seed the raisins reflects a period when seeded muscat raisins were still common in American kitchens and stoning them by hand was ordinary work.