Canada created the Coronation table grape, its name a nod to our dusty old royalist roots (which do not extend into Quebec), in the 70s, but they’ve only become widely available (in southern Ontario and Quebec at least) in the past five years or so. The Coronation grape is very similar to the American Concord grape and not just because they both start with the letter C. They also look and taste very similar, except the Canadian version is seedless.

Anyway, here’s what they look like doused in sugar:

I caught the tail-end of the season last week and made some grape and walnut conserve, substituting Coronation for Concord, inspired by Eugenia Bone’s Concord grape and walnut conserve recipe from her book Well-Preserved, and by a recipe from The New York Times Cookbook published in 1961 and edited by Craig Claiborne. The result was rich and not-too-sweet, something to go with brie and Carr’s water crackers by a crackling fire. you know, WASPy and wintry.

The old version is simply called grape conserve though it specifies Concord as the grape to use and walnuts as the nuts and includes raisins (the old definition of conserve meant fruit with nuts and raisins). I omit the raisins as Eugenia does but go with the NY Times amount of sugar (two cups less than Eugenia). So, here goes:

Coronation grape and walnut conserve

8 cups Coronation or Concord grapes (4 pounds)

4 cups sugar

Zest of one orange

2 cups finely chopped walnuts

Combine the fruit and sugar with a little water (to dissolve the sugar) and cook over medium heat, crushing the grapes with a potato masher then stirring frequently for 20-25 minutes until the skins have loosened and the insides have softened and the mixture becomes a kind of soup. remove from heat and run the soup through a food mill to remove skin and any seeds, then add orange zest and return to a simmer and cook, stirring frequently, for another 25 minutes or more, until it begins to reduce and thicken. Add walnuts and cook for another five minutes. Pour into hot, clean jars and process in a boiling water bath for 30 minutes.

I was getting bored of showing snaps of my jars in front of my black and white tiled kitchen backsplash, so here’s this conserve puckering up in front of a piece of needlepoint by E.’s maternal grandmother (I like how they kind of disappear into darkness at the bottom…):