Yes, you read that right. Pickled grapes.
.
.
The Washington County Historical Society (WCHS) runs an email list notifying members of events and sending out questions from time to time. Over the weekend Victor Hall posed a question about the preserved grapes he remembered his mother, Hannah Crosby Hall, mentioning from her childhood. He noted:
…an earthen crock was filled with grapes over which either sorghum molasses or else vinegar was poured and was stored in the cool cellar. The grapes underwent a dramatic change in taste but adults enjoyed them as a treat and my mother might be sent for some when company came. She never developed a taste for them. Does someone know if it was sorghum molasses, or if was vinegar that was used as the preservative?
I had recently seen a reference to pickled grapes in the diary of Ann Prior Jarvis, which I am slowly annotating, so his question piqued my interest, since it never crossed my mind that they could be anything but the vinegar-preserved pickled grapes which have been featured sometimes in the past few years on trendy food blogs.
Here’s the entry in Ann’s diary:
Sat [October] 4 [1884] Weather pleasant I had my cough very bad for ^hours [indecipherable]
put a jar of grapes down for pickles (Source.)
Nineteenth-century cookbooks show recipes for both molasses- and vinegar-preserved grapes.
Molasses-Preserved
For blueberry pickles, old jars which have lost their covers, or whose edges have been broken so that the covers will not fit tightly, serve an excellent purpose, as these pickles must not be kept air-tight.
Pick over your berries, using only sound ones; fill your jars or wide-mouthed bottles to within an inch of the top, then pour in molasses enough to settle down into all the spaces; this cannot be done in a moment, as molasses does not run very freely. Only lazy people will feel obliged to stand by and watch its progress. As it settles, pour in more until the berries are covered. Then tie over the top a piece of cotton cloth to keep the flies and other insects out and set away in the preserve closet. Cheap molasses is good enough, and your pickles will soon be “sharp.” Wild grapes may be pickled in the same manner. (Source: Hugo Ziemann and Fanny Gillette, The White House Cookbook, 1887.)
Ripe Grape Pickles
7 pounds of ripe grapes stemmed and packed in a jar. Take 1 quart of vinegar, 2 pounds of sugar, 1 level tablespoonful of cloves, 2 tablespoonfuls of cinnamon; boil together ten minutes, skim and let it cool slightly, pour over the grapes. Turn a plate over them and set in cool cellar. Very good. (Maud Cooke, Three Meals a Day, 1893.)
All of the vinegar-based recipes use some sugar. Would the pioneers have substituted molasses for sugar?
The other kind of pickle Ann mentions in her diary is chow-chow. That’s a mix of vegetables, spiced and preserved in vinegar. ((Here’s a chow-chow recipe. Pioneers with English or New England heritage usually called a similar concoction piccalilli.))
References in Utah: Our Pioneer Heritage and Heart Throbs of the West reinforce the suspicion that the pioneer women pickled everything they could, both fruits and vegetables. One passage noted, “After the emigrant settles on his winter diggins [sic], he had better secure provisions enough to last him until April; together with pickles, vinegar, etc. as a preventive to the scurvy.”
Regular vinegar doesn’t have any Vitamin C, but red wine vinegar and pickles do; however, a single serving of cucumber pickles only has about a tenth of the Vitamin C necessary to prevent scurvy, and a cup of red wine vinegar about the same, so hopefully the “etc.” in that passage includes some better sources of Vitamin C, or the pioneers would have been suffering from scurvy like the settlers did in the early days in St. George, Utah.
Back to the vinegar: they may have made it with wine, but 19th-century recipes all seem to start with molasses. For example:
CHEAP VINEGAR
Mix 25 gals. of warm rain water with 4 gals. molasses and 1 gal. yeast and let it ferment; you will soon have the best vinegar; keep adding these articles in these proportions as the stock is sold. (Jacob S. Ammon, Dr. Clark’s recipe book, 1895.)
Would the local grocers have sold vinegar, or would the pioneers have made their own? (Or both?)
Dennis Lancaster notes in his 1972 BYU thesis “Dixie Wine” that sometimes the Washington County settlers made vinegar by mistake when trying to make wine, but they also used the by-products of the winemaking process to make a good-quality vinegar, which they took north to sell. ((Anyone know if there’s a copy of The Utah Pomologist available anywhere online?))
So, I couldn’t answer the question on the WCHS email list, but did get to spend a few pleasant hours thinking about pickled grapes. Have you ever had them? Are you familiar with any other non-cucumber pickles?
Notes.
The picture of the pickled grapes is from Flickr, used as is courtesy of “lauren.”
Since this could be done with a handful of grapes as well as a bushel basketful, I’m going to try the molasses one … or rather, Little White Lab Rat will. Anybody else willing to try it? 🙂
Pickled anything is usually pretty good.
Okay. Maybe not “anything”… Still …
I’m getting set to make a batch of “Fukujinzuke” with daikon and cucumbers. All I have to do is go to the Japanese specialty store and get some red shiso leaves.
The name is written with characters meaning “Happy gods pickle” which, in my opinion, means that the gods themselves would be happy if only they could get some of them.
As to grapes and pickles–why not mash the grapes, ferment them, etc., drink the product and pickle yourself?
They did plenty of that, Mark!
I haven’t personally had much experience with non cucumber- or zucchini-based preserves. I remember someone kindly giving my mother a jar of mustard pickles once upon a time and it sat balefully on the pantry shelf for years.
I reached for my Grandmother’s “Household Discoveries and Mrs. Curtis’s Cook Book”(c) 1908.
The Household Discoveries section of the book had sixteen pages of very fine print instructions for pickling various home-grown products (it looked like nothing went to waste — scraps and too-small items could be tossed into a vinegar brine all week, and then processed at the end of the week). Almost all appeared to be vinegar-based pickles, though many used a sugar-vinegar combination to yield sweet pickles (salty pickles are a salt-vinegar brine). Since molasses is naturally acidic, I wonder if that is why vinegar is not necessary. There were about four recipes for piccalilli/chow-chow. The distinction between the two has to do with the degree of fineness with which the vegetables are chopped, with the more finely chopped vegetables appearing in chow-chow.
In the Mrs. Curtis’s Cook Book section entitled “Favorite Dishes in Famous Homes” I found a recipe for Pickled Peaches, provided by Mrs. W. R. Stubbs, wife of the Governor of Kansas. Anyway, pickled peaches involves a gallon of peeled peaches, 3 pounds sugar, 1 pint cider vinegar, 2 dozen cloves and 6 sticks cinnamon.
But beside the point, the recipe on was on the same facing leaves as “Mince-Meat” from Mrs. Jesse Knight of Utah (the recipe is elsewhere in the chapter described as “excellent”), and “Braised Veal” from Mrs. Thomas P. Gore, wife of the Senator from Oklahoma.
And the third recipe in the chapter — the first after a “Sponge Pudding” from Mrs. William H Taft (Pres) and a “Saratoga Pudding” from Mrs. J S Sherman (Veep) from Mrs. Reed Smoot for “Five-Egg Orange Cake.” I found it fascinating to have Sister Smoot’s recipe listed third so soon after the Smoot Hearings.
That sounds like a great cookbook, Coffinberry. It’s evidently time to pull out a bunch of old cookbooks and make some pickles!
I have a neighbor who is famous for her pickled green beans. My mother made chopped mustard pickle and pickled beets. But I have never heard of pickled grapes.
Surely a sweeping generalisation to claim that only lazy people would want “to stand by and watch [the molasses’] progress”. What about people who are easily fascinated? *cough*me*cough*
Mark B.: would you share your fukujinsuke recipe? Haven’t thought about that in years, and I just bought Japanese curry blocks last week…
…oh, and per the OP: I’m now intrigued by the thought of pickled blueberries and grapes. I love strawberries and balsamic together so I’m thinking this could be yummy.
As for fukujinzuke, the name seems to come from the “Seven Lucky Gods” (七福神), partly because the classic fukujinzuke recipe includes a mix of seven vegetables. Beyond that, there seem to be several theories as to where the name came from and why. The Japanese Wikipedia pages spends several paragraphs discussing the various options.
I’ve never tried making it myself — but on infrequent visits to Japan, I usually bring back a couple of kilos of the stuff, and then hope it lasts until my next trip.
And now I’m hungry for curry rice…
I found your post here in a search for a recipe for pickled grapes after reading my own family history. My great great great grandmother Elizabeth Bentley was reported to make amazing pickled grapes with a combination of vinegar and molasses that she would serve to her family and guests.
Thanks,
Dan
That’s fun to see this old discussion again, and the name Bentley suggests another Dixie settler. I wonder if anyone there still makes pickled grapes or chow-chow.