Mystery Monday – Harvesting Wild Grapes

It’s a mystery to me how I’ve gotten through life so far and why I sometimes do stupid things. 

After finding wild grapes along the trail, I imagined being like my peasant character while I picked them.

I spent an hour harvesting the grapes and another two hours de-stemming them, my fingers hurt as if I’ve been quilting all day without a thimble. With sticky, purple fingers, I mashed and cooked six pound of grapes into beautiful dark juice. Gorgeous.

Still feeling very like a peasant, I read the recipe and let the juice cool and lined a strainer with four layers of cheese cloth. Then, I carefully poured the juice through the cheesecloth. About a cup of the precious juice went down the drain, before I realized I hadn’t put a pot under the strainer!

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. My fingers still hurt and my poor family of peasants would starve if they had to depend on me.

The remaining juice is now in the fridge dripping peacefully. It looks like I have enough juice to go forward, but I’ll have to adjust the other ingredients to make it work.

Peasants from 1650 might have made fruit juice or wine from wild grapes, but not jelly, because they did not have sugar. Nor would they have store-bought pectin to make jelly set, so I found a recipe which doesn’t use pectin. This is an experiment.

Tonight or tomorrow, I’ll get back to it…and turn of the TV tennis matches so I can focus. At least the peasants didn’t have those distractions.

I’ll let you know how it turns out.

For more peasant adventures: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1185865059974956