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Raisinee De Bourgogne
This is an old and very delicious French marmalade. Boil 2 pounds of ripe grapes with 1 cup of water, stirring until soft. The grapes must, of course, be free from seeds and stems. Press through a sieve, forcibly; add 2 pounds of ripe pears, peeled and sliced, and stir until reduced to half the amount. Sweeten to taste, strain again, and put into jars. Set it, in the jars, in the oven overnight, then keep in a cool place. Serve with toast or rolls, for breakfast or afternoon tea.
The cooking is straightforward fruit work; the preserving instruction at the end is the problem, and it is why this page carries a caution.
- Oven "canning" does not preserveSetting filled jars in a slow oven overnight is a method the USDA and every current extension service specifically reject. Dry heat in air does not transfer into the centre of a jar reliably, the contents never reach a verified temperature, and the jars can craze or burst. Whatever seal forms as the jars cool is a vacuum of unknown quality, not a processed one.
- "Sweeten to taste" is the second failureIn a keeping preserve, sugar is not seasoning. It is what lowers the water activity so mould and yeast cannot grow. A jam sweetened to taste and then stored under an unverified seal at room temperature is a spoilage risk, and while grapes are reliably acid, some pears sit closer to the borderline of the acidity that keeps preserves safe. If you want this flavour, cook the fruit and refrigerate it as a fresh compote, or follow a current tested recipe for jars meant to be shelf-stable.
- "Free from seeds and stems"The recipe names no variety, but seeded grapes of the period would have had to be picked over by hand. Seedless table grapes make the instruction moot, and they are likely to give a softer set and a milder flavour than seeded, thicker-skinned fruit.
- "Press through a sieve, forcibly"A conical chinois and a wooden pestle, or a food mill fitted with the fine plate. The point is to leave skins behind while pushing the pulp through, which is what gives the preserve its body.
- "Reduced to half the amount"This is the real instruction in the recipe: the sieved grape pulp plus 2 lb of pears cooked down until roughly halved in volume. Expect a long, slow reduction with frequent stirring, and a scorch risk once the mixture thickens.
- YieldAround three cups, depending on how far you take the reduction — roughly three half-pint jars had it been safely processed.
Raisiné is a long-established preserve in French domestic cookery, and the Burgundian version is often the one described: grape must boiled down for hours, with pears, quinces or apples dropped into it, and no added sugar at all. Before cane sugar was cheap, the grapes were the sugar, and a household with a vineyard could turn surplus fruit into something that kept through winter. Perhaps that is why the sweetening here is an afterthought, added "to taste" rather than weighed — though the connection to a tradition where there was nothing to weigh is a matter of inference. With a Saucepan Over the Sea (Adelaide Keen, 1902) belongs to a genre of turn-of-the-century American books that collected regional European dishes for home cooks who would never travel to eat them, and a Burgundian farmhouse marmalade served with breakfast toast is exactly the sort of borrowing those books traded in.