Grapes, fox grapes and muscadines

I think I mentioned in an earlier blog that we put out concord grape vines this last spring...I built a big arbor and everything for them to grow on. But they didn't grow very much. They made up for it by having loads of grapes on them.

They were supposed to be seedless, but they ended up being the seeded kind. Late this afternoon, I went to pick the last grapes off the vine. Today in the AJC (Atlanta Journal Constitution/aka Atlanta Urinal Constipation) they had an article in the food section about muscadines. For those who aren't familiar with that kind of grape, "it's a southern thing, you wouldn't understand."

My grandmother on my Dad's side, Momma Jones, used to have a big arbor beside her house on Royston Street in Gainesville, with a very large grape arbor that was covered in muscadine vines. The grapes are huge, and grow singly instead of in bunches like other grapes. They can be reddish, but mostly are kind of a greeny-golden color. They have a very strong "Welch's Grape Jelly" type of smell and flavor, and make great jelly. Momma Jones somehow was able to get the seeds out and leave the skins in to make grape jam, which was also really good. (In fact most things she cooked were really good-I still haven't found fig preserves as good as hers, and I've been looking about 45 years now.)

Anyway, that article about muscadines reminded me that my Mom had said that there were lots of fox grapes growing wild on the place where we live now. I was afraid I'd pulled down the main vine, since year before last I'd pulled down a very large fox grape vine to make a Christmas wreath. No worries! I found fox grapes were growing in several places around our property.

Fox grapes are about the size of regular grapes, but perfectly round instead of ovoid. They range in color from green through a reddish blush on one side to very red to almost black. As it got on toward dark, I must have picked up about 3 or 4 pints of fox grapes from the ground (those that had fallen from vines very high up in trees), out of a ditch (where they'd been washed by a recent heavy rain), and even from some vines--those that were within reach and weren't too surrounded by blackberry bushes.

So tonight I washed the grapes and started making grape jelly. It's really simple. You put a small amount of water in the pot with the grapes, boil them until the skins pop and they get mushy, and then squeeze the grapes through cloth to get juice. You mix sugar in equal volume with the juice, boil it until it "sheets" off a spoon, then put it in hot jars and seal it with mason lids (you have to process those in a water bath) or with hot wax poured over the jelly to seal it from contact with the air.

I didn't have the right kind of cloth, so I just processed the grapes through my manual food mill. This gives you sort of a cross between grape jelly and grape jam. I had put up two small jars of jelly a few days ago, and processed them with mason jar seals, etc. But I've filled up all the jars I have up here in the house (hope more are in the basement). So I was going to re-fill a jar formerly used for honey, and a highball glass that somehow ended up here in this teetotalling home.

Paraffin wax is used to seal jelly, so genius here decided to heat it up in the microwave...didn't realize that paraffin gets MUCH hotter than water. When I took the bowl out of the oven and set it on the countertop, the temperature differential started the glass bowl cracking...with it full of melted wax! What a mess!

Anyway, after I cleaned that up, I managed to rig up a double boiler to melt more wax, and finally got the jelly sealed in the highball glass, which I guess by definition is now a jelly glass. I didn't need the former honey jar, so I'm saving it for future misadventures.

If I remember, I'll try to report later on whether the jelly was worth all this hassle! It looks good, anyway...the fox grapes mixed with the concords cause it to be redder in color than the purple jelly I made a few days ago which had only concord grapes.