The grandsons’ good work in the processes of transforming grapes into jelly is rewarding with its spread onto warm homemade bread.
Sandy Gates, who lives a little over a mile down our rural Botetourt County, Virginia road from Elaine and me, has a longstanding agreement with us. Every September, Sandy grants us grape gathering rights in exchange for a jar of Elaine’s homemade wineberry jam. It’s fair bartering as my wife’s jam sublimely complements any homemade biscuit or bread.
Sandy’s are some of the most productive summer grape vines in the area. We visit when the globes have ripened just enough that their tartness is at its peak, but not so ripe that the songbirds have visited before us.
Arriving with a stepladder and a large brown bucket, I ascend and sever, then drop grape clusters into the container that Elaine cradles with one hand while the other steadies the ladder. After about 10 minutes, the bucket brims with grape clusters. Then it’s time to make the short drive home and call our daughter Sarah, who along with her husband David and their sons, Sam, age 10, and Eli, age 8, live across the hollow from us.
Our grandsons know the routine about grape gathering day. The four of us are soon sitting around a table on our sundeck, and painstakingly plucking hundreds of grapes from their stems.
Next, it’s time to rinse the grapes, place them in a pot, cover the fruit with water, and cook 10 to 15 minutes “to make juice.” We pour the juice through a strainer, separating out the seeds and skins, a prelude to chilling the liquid overnight.
The following evening, the serious business of making jelly begins. First, Elaine pours the juice through cheesecloth to remove tartrate crystals that form overnight. Then she empties the juice into a large kettle, adds pectin and brings the mixture to a boil. After sugar is added and the mixture again comes to a boil, the sweet, tarty aroma of soon-to-be-jelly dominates our kitchen airspace.
Last, my sweetheart pours the mixture into jars, add lids, positions them in a water bath, and after a while removes them. As Elaine always says, “All that’s left now is to listen for the ‘happy pop’ of lids sealing…the sounds of a successful effort.”
In a good year of grape gathering, we’ll “put up” six jars of jelly…perhaps some would say not much of payoff for two evenings of toil. But few things in life are as emotionally satisfying as gathering wild edibles and transforming them into something as tasty as homemade summer grape jelly.
This belief is confirmed when Sam and Eli come over for dinner a few weeks later to claim the reward for their labor. Elaine has baked sourdough bread, and the boys experience the joy of spreading homemade jelly (which they helped create) over hot, homemade bread. Each youngster asks for a second serving, and I confess that I consume three slices. So, yes, I would propose that that evening alone makes our efforts worthwhile.
The story above first appeared in our September / October 2023 issue.
