Corey and I celebrated the end of summer with an abundance of Concord grapes. I wrote (lengthily) about our misadventures. Enjoy.
Preserving Summer
We’ve lamented them before and we’ll do it again: New England winters can be cruel, long, disheartening seasons. But as New Englanders, we know what to expect, and we wouldn’t be able to project our tough-it-up cynicism without it. It justifies the New England “charm”: stoic in the pristine, snow-blanketed Lexington and Concord, shahhp-tongued in Saugus and Revere. It gives New Englanders the right to verbally wallop any outsider who asks, as if we have all lost our minds, “How do you live up here?”
The secret to our survival is, of course, New England summers. In their 75-degree days, blue skies stretching over rock coast beaches, token lobster shacks placed in such asymmetrical rugged perfection, New England has a recipe that works: a winter that bites and a summer that is its antidote. But there’s one thing that’s crueler than a New England winter, and that is a summer that never arrives. When May drowned on this year, and June cowered behind clouds, flaccid and 60-degreed, we began to think the God who so loved the Patriots and Red Sox was playing a mean trick.
This summer was also remarkable in that it was the third birthday of my Concord grape vine; provided the right climate (aka: sunshine), it might produce fruit from the established wood of the previous two summers. The vine – a neglected pipsqueak we found on sale at Home Depot for $10 – is a native in our neighborhood of Area Four, Cambridge. (Contrary to the connotations of its name, Area Four is not the sighting of alien spaceships or a testing zone for nuclear weapons; it is a compact wedge of old houses and apartment buildings flanked by the bustle of Central Square, the quirk of Inman, and the techies down toward the river in Kendall.) A short stroll around the blocks of Area Four uncover countless bountiful grapevines: ancients with leathery wood; wild, untamed looping vines with arms reaching into the street; tightly manicured vines with leaves fat enough to comfort a shivering, post-apple Adam. They tend to be found trailing over driveways of the houses that have BMIBs (Blessed Mothers in Bathtubs) out back, the vines planted ages ago by residents of Portuguese and Italian descent who populated the area back when it was home to NECCO and Squirrel Brand candy factories. Lacking any inclination for horticulture but wanting to fit in, my husband, Corey, and I patted the earth around our little vine gently, whispered some good luck wishes, and let it go.
When summer finally showed her face in mid-July this year, we discovered our grapevine had sprouted green pearl-sized fruit. We were cautious to rejoice. It was possible our wall-flower sun had seriously stunted our grapes. But summer persisted, August bringing us the season on which we thrive, and lo and behold, the miniature green bunches were swelling steadily into a waxy indigo. Soon enough, our makeshift arbor was groaning under the weight of the god-like fruits.
Of course, this prompted the question of what to do with all these unexpected grapes. While starting our own Area Four speak-easy was attractive, with our complete ignorance to the wine-making process, we’d surely end up with the sweet headachy wine produced by Mediterranean grandfathers. Someone told me about a grape pie, which sounded intriguing. But how many of those could I eat or pawn off on friends?
Jam was the best idea – thicker, less school-lunchy than jelly. I remembered canning tomatoes and peaches under the direction of my kitchen goddess mother and loving it: the steam rising from the pot in our kitchen in Lancaster County, PA, chopping warm peaches on the white plastic cutting board, shining the glossy Ball jars carefully before placing them in an impressive row on a basement shelf where they gleamed steadily into our mild winter. What would be a better recession Christmas present than homemade jam? I was inspired; after reading a few recipes online, it appeared relatively simple. Grapes + sugar = jam. I stocked up on jars, lids, and a fun jar grabber thingie at Tag’s hardware in Porter Square; I was to revisit the survivalist achievement of New England women before me: canning.
I had intended to wait for the promising three full days off of Labor Day to jam it up. But after the excitement of a trip to Tag’s, I couldn’t wait for the weekend. Friday night found me in the kitchen, remembering the days of suiting up in homemade aprons in my mother’s kitchen. The recipe I was planning to use contained the following steps (briefly): put 4 lbs. of grapes through a blender or food processor, cook them down in a heavy-bottomed pot, strain them through a cheese cloth or food mill to remove the seeds, put the mixture back in the pot, add 6 cups of sugar (holy carbs!), simmer, and then can. Simple.
Step one was problematic as I don’t own a food scale. (Confession: we are one of those happy households who don’t even own a bathroom scale.) How to determine how many grapes we had? Corey enjoyed trying to rig a scale out of a tall vase and a two-by-four with plastic plates on either end. While we were impressed with ourselves at this invention that took up the entire living room of our apartment, the grapes didn’t want to stay on the plates, and rolled across the floor like marbles, smashing under foot and getting lost beneath the couch. We went for a less accurate measurement –
Does this feel like four pounds to you?
Yeah, kind of.
Blending went swimmingly. Pot boiling – lovely; it filled the house with a tangy aroma. For straining out seeds, I attached a cheesecloth to a bowl with a rubber band and began pouring in the hot grape pulp (real chefs everywhere are cringing by now). Nothing much happened. I mashed it around a little with a fork. A thin drip of pulp hit the bottom of the bowl with a pathetic plop.
This is where patience should have kicked in, and like a truly Zen kitchenista, I should have walked away, let gravity do its plodding work, came back an hour or so later, added more pulp, and stayed up all night straining grapes, contemplating life and writing my new essay “Zen and the Art of Concord Grape Jamming.” New essay was not to be. As so many of us know, patience died a decisive death when Al Gore invented the Internet; a week of work in a cube at a lightning fast computer does not a patient cook make. Frustrated and tired, I snapped off the rubber band, sending the cheesecloth into the soup and spraying a good deal of grape juice onto walls and apron. My hands were quickly dyed a bloody purple as I attempted to squeeze the pulp through the cloth. After another hour, my kitchen looked like a murder scene, and I had technically conquered the concords, with a whopping five cups of pulpy, seed-free juice to show for it. And I hadn’t even made them into jam yet. Exasperated and defeated, I threw in the towel and went to bed.
I woke Saturday to a cloudless sky and decided I was done with the pioneer woman stint. This was a New England summer day we’d been starved for all year, and my husband and I were not going to miss a second of it. We strapped the kayak to the car, put the grapes in the fridge, and took off to Plum Island. On the way there, Corey decided he needed a beach chair, so we stopped off at a bustling garage sale on the edge of Newburyport run by a tanned, salty, retired couple.
I love a good tag sale for the strange etiquette that is permissible:
1) You get to put all your junk on the curb and ask people to pay you for it, and
2) Strangers are allowed to enter your property and ask you if you have any x, y, or z that they might not see out and you might actually go in your house, decide you really don’t need or like x, y, or z anymore, and sell it to them for an insanely low price.
We got lucky with both; the salty lady had an old scale out – a rusty antique probably used by actual New England pioneer women back in the day and 2) after asking for a beach chair, the salty man retreated into his garage and brought out an old, cobwebby chair. We got it for free with the scale. Further, with the purchase of the scale, surely a sign, I had assuaged my guilt at my lack of perseverance; I vowed to return to the grapes. But first: real summer and a glorious day of it in one of the last discovered-but-not-invaded beaches within an hour of Boston.
Plum Island is a barrier island, one that continuously threatens to wash into the sea. Most of the land is park and bird reserve, with two smallish parking lots that fill quickly, limiting the flow of beach-goers onto the majority of the island. On the northern tip of the island, houses crouch precariously on ground designed to shift and change like a snow drift. The islanders have lobbied for support in dredging the Merrimack River and depositing sand on Plum in a battle with Mother Nature that will probably never end.
In this unsustainable land that might just wash away underfoot, we found summer in its peaceful flourish. Mad Martha’s, the only café on the island, was serving up blueberry pancakes as we rolled past. Teenagers in bikinis sauntered barefoot along the road. A wet-suited surf kayaker, black and slippery like a seal in neoprene, carried his boat toward the sandbar, where the waves were breaking in smooth curls. We had our day there, a perfect summer’s day that passed so quickly we recounted everything we saw and did on the ride home to ingrain it in our memories, from the unbelievably yappy women on the blanket next to us, to the harvest moon rising in an opal-pink glow over the water at the end of the day.
After this, I was refreshed, summered, and ready to get back to the grapes. This time, I was going to be patient. After some further research, I discovered that doing this the right way means removing the skins from the grapes by hand, a process that sounds painstakingly tedious – squeeze the grape, put skin in one bowl, pulp of grape in another – but was incredibly therapeutic. Or maybe Plum Island worked its summer magic on me; either way, I spent a good 45 minutes skinning the concords, listening to the kids shouting across the street, to a neighbor’s Tower of Power blasting from her window, to intermittent sirens and car alarms – sounds of my neighborhood summering.
The scale worked just as well as it did in its heyday in 1920. I skinned four pounds of grapes, and was left with a pot full of green jelly eyes. These simmered beautifully on the stove, and as I stirred, the seeds became separated from the pulp in a wonderfully sensible way. I used a colander in place of the cheesecloth, and the green pulp drained, slow and steady, away from the seeds. The blender made quick work of the skins, and then I reunited the best of the grapes into the pot, watching as green pulp swirled with purple skins, creating a magnificently deep ruby color. I added the sugar, and a finger in the pot told me I had made a damn good jam.
While my mother, probably recalling a spitting caldron of boiling water and two kids whining at her to get a closer hand in the action, warned me that I should probably just freeze my jam, canning proved to be not so difficult. True, I scalded myself all kinds of crazy trying to retrieve the jars from the pot. And yes, impatience struck again and I removed one jar too early from the bunch. But when it was all said and done, I had seven steaming jars on my counter, popping merrily as they suctioned shut.
After all this laboring, I find it hard to believe it is possible to purchase a jar of Smuckers at the grocery store for a measly $3.00. Is it really worth it to spend all this time individually squeezing each tiny Concord grape, slaving over boiling pots, juggling steaming glass jars, when they’ve constructed entire factories to do this work?
But what is preserved in those jars as they speed their way through a warehouse, passing hordes of workers whose ears are ringing not with the sounds of summer and satisfaction of popping jars, but the drone of super-human canning machines? What I’ve managed to save in my classic Ball jars is what so many of us sought this Labor Day: a respite from our machine-run lives in the pleasures of a sun drenched beach; the memory of our mothers or grandmothers doing these same things in exactly the same way; the smell of an arbor heavy with grapes as they ripen, and summer gives us one last day.
Preserving Summer
We’ve lamented them before and we’ll do it again: New England winters can be cruel, long, disheartening seasons. But as New Englanders, we know what to expect, and we wouldn’t be able to project our tough-it-up cynicism without it. It justifies the New England “charm”: stoic in the pristine, snow-blanketed Lexington and Concord, shahhp-tongued in Saugus and Revere. It gives New Englanders the right to verbally wallop any outsider who asks, as if we have all lost our minds, “How do you live up here?”The secret to our survival is, of course, New England summers. In their 75-degree days, blue skies stretching over rock coast beaches, token lobster shacks placed in such asymmetrical rugged perfection, New England has a recipe that works: a winter that bites and a summer that is its antidote. But there’s one thing that’s crueler than a New England winter, and that is a summer that never arrives. When May drowned on this year, and June cowered behind clouds, flaccid and 60-degreed, we began to think the God who so loved the Patriots and Red Sox was playing a mean trick.
This summer was also remarkable in that it was the third birthday of my Concord grape vine; provided the right climate (aka: sunshine), it might produce fruit from the established wood of the previous two summers. The vine – a neglected pipsqueak we found on sale at Home Depot for $10 – is a native in our neighborhood of Area Four, Cambridge. (Contrary to the connotations of its name, Area Four is not the sighting of alien spaceships or a testing zone for nuclear weapons; it is a compact wedge of old houses and apartment buildings flanked by the bustle of Central Square, the quirk of Inman, and the techies down toward the river in Kendall.) A short stroll around the blocks of Area Four uncover countless bountiful grapevines: ancients with leathery wood; wild, untamed looping vines with arms reaching into the street; tightly manicured vines with leaves fat enough to comfort a shivering, post-apple Adam. They tend to be found trailing over driveways of the houses that have BMIBs (Blessed Mothers in Bathtubs) out back, the vines planted ages ago by residents of Portuguese and Italian descent who populated the area back when it was home to NECCO and Squirrel Brand candy factories. Lacking any inclination for horticulture but wanting to fit in, my husband, Corey, and I patted the earth around our little vine gently, whispered some good luck wishes, and let it go.
When summer finally showed her face in mid-July this year, we discovered our grapevine had sprouted green pearl-sized fruit. We were cautious to rejoice. It was possible our wall-flower sun had seriously stunted our grapes. But summer persisted, August bringing us the season on which we thrive, and lo and behold, the miniature green bunches were swelling steadily into a waxy indigo. Soon enough, our makeshift arbor was groaning under the weight of the god-like fruits.
Of course, this prompted the question of what to do with all these unexpected grapes. While starting our own Area Four speak-easy was attractive, with our complete ignorance to the wine-making process, we’d surely end up with the sweet headachy wine produced by Mediterranean grandfathers. Someone told me about a grape pie, which sounded intriguing. But how many of those could I eat or pawn off on friends?
Jam was the best idea – thicker, less school-lunchy than jelly. I remembered canning tomatoes and peaches under the direction of my kitchen goddess mother and loving it: the steam rising from the pot in our kitchen in Lancaster County, PA, chopping warm peaches on the white plastic cutting board, shining the glossy Ball jars carefully before placing them in an impressive row on a basement shelf where they gleamed steadily into our mild winter. What would be a better recession Christmas present than homemade jam? I was inspired; after reading a few recipes online, it appeared relatively simple. Grapes + sugar = jam. I stocked up on jars, lids, and a fun jar grabber thingie at Tag’s hardware in Porter Square; I was to revisit the survivalist achievement of New England women before me: canning.
I had intended to wait for the promising three full days off of Labor Day to jam it up. But after the excitement of a trip to Tag’s, I couldn’t wait for the weekend. Friday night found me in the kitchen, remembering the days of suiting up in homemade aprons in my mother’s kitchen. The recipe I was planning to use contained the following steps (briefly): put 4 lbs. of grapes through a blender or food processor, cook them down in a heavy-bottomed pot, strain them through a cheese cloth or food mill to remove the seeds, put the mixture back in the pot, add 6 cups of sugar (holy carbs!), simmer, and then can. Simple.
Step one was problematic as I don’t own a food scale. (Confession: we are one of those happy households who don’t even own a bathroom scale.) How to determine how many grapes we had? Corey enjoyed trying to rig a scale out of a tall vase and a two-by-four with plastic plates on either end. While we were impressed with ourselves at this invention that took up the entire living room of our apartment, the grapes didn’t want to stay on the plates, and rolled across the floor like marbles, smashing under foot and getting lost beneath the couch. We went for a less accurate measurement –
Does this feel like four pounds to you?
Yeah, kind of.
Blending went swimmingly. Pot boiling – lovely; it filled the house with a tangy aroma. For straining out seeds, I attached a cheesecloth to a bowl with a rubber band and began pouring in the hot grape pulp (real chefs everywhere are cringing by now). Nothing much happened. I mashed it around a little with a fork. A thin drip of pulp hit the bottom of the bowl with a pathetic plop.
This is where patience should have kicked in, and like a truly Zen kitchenista, I should have walked away, let gravity do its plodding work, came back an hour or so later, added more pulp, and stayed up all night straining grapes, contemplating life and writing my new essay “Zen and the Art of Concord Grape Jamming.” New essay was not to be. As so many of us know, patience died a decisive death when Al Gore invented the Internet; a week of work in a cube at a lightning fast computer does not a patient cook make. Frustrated and tired, I snapped off the rubber band, sending the cheesecloth into the soup and spraying a good deal of grape juice onto walls and apron. My hands were quickly dyed a bloody purple as I attempted to squeeze the pulp through the cloth. After another hour, my kitchen looked like a murder scene, and I had technically conquered the concords, with a whopping five cups of pulpy, seed-free juice to show for it. And I hadn’t even made them into jam yet. Exasperated and defeated, I threw in the towel and went to bed.
I woke Saturday to a cloudless sky and decided I was done with the pioneer woman stint. This was a New England summer day we’d been starved for all year, and my husband and I were not going to miss a second of it. We strapped the kayak to the car, put the grapes in the fridge, and took off to Plum Island. On the way there, Corey decided he needed a beach chair, so we stopped off at a bustling garage sale on the edge of Newburyport run by a tanned, salty, retired couple.I love a good tag sale for the strange etiquette that is permissible:
1) You get to put all your junk on the curb and ask people to pay you for it, and
2) Strangers are allowed to enter your property and ask you if you have any x, y, or z that they might not see out and you might actually go in your house, decide you really don’t need or like x, y, or z anymore, and sell it to them for an insanely low price.
We got lucky with both; the salty lady had an old scale out – a rusty antique probably used by actual New England pioneer women back in the day and 2) after asking for a beach chair, the salty man retreated into his garage and brought out an old, cobwebby chair. We got it for free with the scale. Further, with the purchase of the scale, surely a sign, I had assuaged my guilt at my lack of perseverance; I vowed to return to the grapes. But first: real summer and a glorious day of it in one of the last discovered-but-not-invaded beaches within an hour of Boston.
Plum Island is a barrier island, one that continuously threatens to wash into the sea. Most of the land is park and bird reserve, with two smallish parking lots that fill quickly, limiting the flow of beach-goers onto the majority of the island. On the northern tip of the island, houses crouch precariously on ground designed to shift and change like a snow drift. The islanders have lobbied for support in dredging the Merrimack River and depositing sand on Plum in a battle with Mother Nature that will probably never end.
In this unsustainable land that might just wash away underfoot, we found summer in its peaceful flourish. Mad Martha’s, the only café on the island, was serving up blueberry pancakes as we rolled past. Teenagers in bikinis sauntered barefoot along the road. A wet-suited surf kayaker, black and slippery like a seal in neoprene, carried his boat toward the sandbar, where the waves were breaking in smooth curls. We had our day there, a perfect summer’s day that passed so quickly we recounted everything we saw and did on the ride home to ingrain it in our memories, from the unbelievably yappy women on the blanket next to us, to the harvest moon rising in an opal-pink glow over the water at the end of the day.
After this, I was refreshed, summered, and ready to get back to the grapes. This time, I was going to be patient. After some further research, I discovered that doing this the right way means removing the skins from the grapes by hand, a process that sounds painstakingly tedious – squeeze the grape, put skin in one bowl, pulp of grape in another – but was incredibly therapeutic. Or maybe Plum Island worked its summer magic on me; either way, I spent a good 45 minutes skinning the concords, listening to the kids shouting across the street, to a neighbor’s Tower of Power blasting from her window, to intermittent sirens and car alarms – sounds of my neighborhood summering.
The scale worked just as well as it did in its heyday in 1920. I skinned four pounds of grapes, and was left with a pot full of green jelly eyes. These simmered beautifully on the stove, and as I stirred, the seeds became separated from the pulp in a wonderfully sensible way. I used a colander in place of the cheesecloth, and the green pulp drained, slow and steady, away from the seeds. The blender made quick work of the skins, and then I reunited the best of the grapes into the pot, watching as green pulp swirled with purple skins, creating a magnificently deep ruby color. I added the sugar, and a finger in the pot told me I had made a damn good jam.
While my mother, probably recalling a spitting caldron of boiling water and two kids whining at her to get a closer hand in the action, warned me that I should probably just freeze my jam, canning proved to be not so difficult. True, I scalded myself all kinds of crazy trying to retrieve the jars from the pot. And yes, impatience struck again and I removed one jar too early from the bunch. But when it was all said and done, I had seven steaming jars on my counter, popping merrily as they suctioned shut.
After all this laboring, I find it hard to believe it is possible to purchase a jar of Smuckers at the grocery store for a measly $3.00. Is it really worth it to spend all this time individually squeezing each tiny Concord grape, slaving over boiling pots, juggling steaming glass jars, when they’ve constructed entire factories to do this work?
But what is preserved in those jars as they speed their way through a warehouse, passing hordes of workers whose ears are ringing not with the sounds of summer and satisfaction of popping jars, but the drone of super-human canning machines? What I’ve managed to save in my classic Ball jars is what so many of us sought this Labor Day: a respite from our machine-run lives in the pleasures of a sun drenched beach; the memory of our mothers or grandmothers doing these same things in exactly the same way; the smell of an arbor heavy with grapes as they ripen, and summer gives us one last day.