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Unfermented Grape Juice
This delightfully refreshing summer drink may be made from three to four cents a quart bottle. Pick over the grapes, rejecting all unsound ones, almost cover with cold water in a porcelain-lined kettle, heat slowly (mashing), and cook until all the juice is freed. Drain in jelly bag. Measure the juice, add one-third of a cupful of granulated sugar for each quart; boil for four minutes, bottle and seal. So wholesome is this drink that the unfermented "grape juice cure" for dyspepsia, has become a popular fad in Germany, and there is no doubt of its beneficial quality.
A straightforward hot-extraction juice, with the period's usual vagueness about quantity and sealing. Two things need attention: the vessel and what happens to the bottles afterward.
- Nonreactive equipment"Porcelain-lined kettle" means an enamelled pot, specified because grape acid strips tin and reacts with bare iron or aluminium, turning the juice grey and metallic. Stainless steel or enamelled cast iron does the same job.
- The grapesThis assumes slip-skin American grapes, almost certainly Concord, which are high in acid and pectin and give the deep purple juice the recipe expects. Table grapes from a supermarket will yield a paler, flatter juice.
- How much water"Almost cover with cold water" dilutes heavily by modern taste. About a cup of water per 4 lb of fruit is enough to keep the grapes from scorching before their own juice runs.
- Jelly bagA double layer of damp cheesecloth in a colander, or a fine jelly bag, left to drip. Do not squeeze or press if you want clear juice; pressure forces through fine sediment that will never settle out.
- SugarOne-third cup per quart is about 2 1/2 oz, lightly sweet by design. Ripe Concords need little more.
- The four-minute boilThis is the pasteurising step, not a reduction. Longer boiling cooks off the fresh grape aroma and pushes the flavour toward jam.
- Sealing"Bottle and seal" reflects a time when corks, wax and sealing wire were still in use alongside the screw-top canning jars already available. Fill clean canning jars to 1/4 inch of the top with the juice at a full boil and process in a boiling water bath for 5 minutes, following current canning guidance; grape juice is high-acid, so the risk is mould and yeast spoilage rather than anything worse, but an unprocessed cork will not keep it through a summer.
- SedimentBottled grape juice throws a crust of tartrate crystals and a fine lees within a few weeks. This is normal. Let the jars stand a month in a cool dark place and decant off the clear juice.
- YieldRoughly 4 lb of grapes gives about a quart of finished juice.
- The health claimThe "grape juice cure" for dyspepsia was a period health fashion, not medicine. Treat the last sentence as historical colour.
Unfermented grape juice was a product with a mission. Commercial pasteurised juice is generally traced to Thomas Bramwell Welch, a New Jersey dentist and Methodist communionist who in 1869 heated bottled Concord juice to keep it from turning to wine, so that temperance congregations could take an unfermented cup; his son built the business that still carries the name. By the 1890s the drink had escaped church use and become a respectable household beverage. The German "grape cure" the author invokes was a real fashion — the Traubenkur of Rhineland and Tyrolean spa towns, where patients were prescribed pounds of grapes or their juice daily for digestive complaints — and its mention here does the same work as the price per quart: it reassures the reader that a drink this pleasant is also thrifty and good for her.