Appalachian Home Cooking by Mark F. Sohn

Author:Mark F. Sohn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2011-08-20T16:00:00+00:00

Grapes

Another fall fruit is the Concord grape. Like the native American crab apples that farmers grafted with European apples, the Concord grape was the result of an intense breeding program. While European grapes tend to have thin skins, native American grapes are thick-skinned. Botanists call them slipskins; settlers and foragers today call them fox grapes. Two hundred years ago, the wild grapes growing in New England were abundant, beautiful, and sweet-smelling, but they did not taste good, and so some New Englanders stored them in brandy. However, Ephraim Wales Bull of Concord, a friend of Henry David Thoreau, believed he could find a solution to this problem, and he worked hard to create a new grape. After ten years, in 1853, Bull presented a new grape to the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, and he called it a Concord. It did not take long for the new Concords to spread to Appalachia, where mountaineers used them to make wine, juice, and pie.

In southern Appalachia, the wild grapes are muscadines, foxes, possums, and scuppernongs. Scuppernongs are a kind of muscadine, and they taste so sweet that some people compare their jelly to honey. Muscadines grow on tall trees, fence rows, and in cool creek valleys. The grape is common in eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina as well as most other Southern states and even southern Illinois. Unlike most grapes, muscadines, or Vitis rotundifolia, grow with just one or two grapes per cluster. Each grape may be an inch across, and the skins are thick. The flavor may suggest Concord, but these are different. The species includes scuppernongs, muscatels, nobles, magnolias, and bullace grapes (see the photo insert).

In the wild, foragers knock muscadines off the vines and pick them off the ground like acorns. In the market, they are the size of cherry tomatoes, and rather than being sold in bunches like other grapes, they are sold loose in boxes. These large, green grapes hold well in a refrigerator, and their flavor is full. Muscadines are used in traditional Southern and mountain kitchens for preserves and wines. Some cooks use them for tea and others make them into pie. Some make juice. And why not? This grape makes a pungent juice, and some modern chefs use it to flavor vinaigrettes.

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