Peggy’s Prompt—jelly—30 minutes—020611

Peggy’s Prompt—jelly—30 minutes—020611

Not too long after we moved to the Pfafftown house, with its crabapple tree, pear tree, plum tree, peach tree, and the muscadine grapes, I decided to become one of those women who “puts up” food for the winter. My Grandmother Roberts had, every year, made guava jelly (my favorite), from the guavas from the trees in their yard. I guess I was looking for my roots or something. Unfortunately for me, just after I’d bought all the canning jars and lids and long tongs and a wide-mouth funnel, I came down with Hepatitis A, what they used to call infectious hepatitis. Not hep C, which for a long time was incurable, or hep B which is usually sexually transmitted, but hep A, the kind you get from food that’s been handled by a restaurant worker who has ignored the sign in the restroom to wash hands with soap and water. (How I came to get hep A is another story.) So that hep A summer, I didn’t make any jellies or preserves or jams, but Grandma Camp did. She made peach preserves and plum jelly that was yum-yum good.

But I was still hankering to show that I, too, could live off the land, so the next summer I decided to make muscadine jelly from the muscadine grapes that grew for free beside our driveway. It would be much more exotic than peach preserves, more along the lines of guava jelly. Not everyone would have tasted muscadine jelly.

Making muscadine jelly is not for the faint of heart. First you have to pick the grapes (one at a time, as they don’t grow in clusters). And if you have a 2 ½ year old boy helping you, you have to face the fact that most of the grapes he picks are going into his mouth, not into the bucket. But finally, after picking grapes every night after supper for a week, I judged that we had enough for my first batch of jelly.

Now we had in this house a very small kitchen. Almost no counter space that wasn’t taken up with microwave or toaster or coffee maker. So right away I had to finesse some make-shift surfaces to hold my little canning jars—the ones I so carefully boiled and lifted with sterile tongs onto the make-shift surface. It turns out that I’d skipped a step, the part where you get the juice ready to pour into the canning jars. So, backing up on the recipe, I washed the grapes, de-stemmed them, and placed them in a large bowl to crush (no bare feet for me, thank you). First I mashed them as best I could with my grandmother’s heavy wire potato masher. Then I tried putting a smaller bowl inside the big bowl the semi-crushed grapes were in and pressing down very, very hard. Needless to say, a fair amount of juice shot out of the crack between the two bowls and splashed on everything. Undaunted though, I constructed a Rube Goldberg apparatus with which to strain the juice away from the mashed skins and pulp. This involved several layers of cheesecloth (I had to go to several hardware stores to find cheesecloth) folded into a bag-like shape, a shoestring to tie the bag to the handle of an overhead cabinet, and a large bowl on the counter under the cabinet for the strained juice to drip into. I’m not sure how canning pros would have done this, but not my way, I can assure you. Anyhow, next morning there was about three tablespoons of muscadine juice in the catching bowl, and the bagful of juice and pulp and skins hadn’t changed shape at all. Apparently I had used a few too many folds of cheesecloth, and had effectively made a leak-proof bag. Who knew? Anyhow, I poured out the contents of the bag into a big pot, re-assembled the (wet and gross) cheesecloth bag, got the *&@# grape juice/pulp/skin mixture back in the bag, and hung it up to do its business during the day while I was at work.

Voila! When I arrived home that afternoon, I had a large pool of muscadine juice (nearly colorless, almost a champagne color) in the collecting bowl, and with some judicious squeezing of the now-limp bag, I managed to get another fair portion of juice into the collecting bowl.

Now, I was ready for bear. I had my juice, my sterilized (well, they were a day or two ago and nobody’d touched them) jars, my sugar, and whatever else the recipe called for. I’ve blocked much of it out by now. So I cooked up the sugared juice, poured it through my new wide-mouth funnel into the little jelly jars, losing only about twenty percent in the process, and wound up with twenty-four beautiful home-made jellies.

Once they had cooled and the lids sealed, I packed them up in the box the jars came in, and proudly wrote Muscadine Jelly, Summer 1980 on the outside. I left one out for us to eat on our breakfast toast.

I ate that whole jar myself, and it was delicious, if I do say so myself, but not another member of the family would touch it. I hadn’t counted on the fact that most people would be a bit suspicious of a jar of nearly clear gelatin-like substance that I was passing off as homemade muscadine jelly. (Jelly is colorful, right?) So when Christmas came and I considered giving my little jars of homemade muscadine jelly from my own grapevines to friends and relatives, I had second thoughts. Leaving another jar or two out for myself, I gave that box of muscadine jelly to a half-way house for women, with a note explaining that muscadine grapes are white inside, and so make clear jelly. I hope someone there was willing to give it a taste.

That was the last time I ever “put up” anything from the fruit trees and vines. We ate the crops raw from then on.