This is the season for muscadines, the wild grape native to the American Southeast. They are in season during September and October, and so just when you think you can't bear the heat for one more week in Florida or Georgia, these bronze and purple globes show up at the produce market bearing the promise of fall.
Muscadines are only partially related to more domesticated grapes. They're wild and they taste like it. The inner flesh is rich and thick, with an intense sweetness like a Concord grape, and they have tough spicy skins that taste like plums.
Scuppernongs are a specific type of muscadine, usually bronze or green, and they are slightly less sweet than the purple variety. They were one of the first types of grape to be used to make wine in the United States, and some people still make homemade wine from the muscadine and scuppernong vines ranging over their back lots. The fruit makes a wonderful jam, too.
Muscadine jam in half-pints. This is a rich, spicy, almost smoky jam.
I would go back to the produce stand two or three times a week during muscadine season, greedily buying up pints for jam, or just for eating. Sometimes I peel the skin away, push the seeds out with my thumb and eat the insides. But most of the time I pop the whole thing in my mouth and spit the seeds out, savoring that wild taste you find in so few fruits these days.
If you are so lucky as to find a pint or two of muscadines where you live, buy them, eat them and enjoy their wild flavor here at the very end of the summer.
• Muscadine Recipes at North Carolina Wines
• More muscadine pictures and info at Wikipedia
(Re-edited from post originally published October 6, 2006)
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You might be seeing alot of comments from me today. I've been away from AT since about March. I love this "Kitchen" section.
On muscadines, I can speak! I remember going out on ventures with my family to pick muscadines for my Dad to make some wonderful wines. Sometimes we had to do some climbing as the vines (and the resulting fruit) ended up far off the ground! He's been winemaking for around 40 years now. The Jaboticaba, a fruit that emerges from trunks and branches of the tree, is very similar in taste to muscadine and found here in Hawaii. As I take up my family's tradition (my grandfather made sparkling wine), I had to start with fresh lychee fruit, no muscadines here.
While my father is racking his muscadine wine in Florida this week, I hope someday to do the same with jaboticaba here in Hawaii.
Cooking Cajun
oh! this post makes me so happy; i'm a georgia gal (or was) and grew up eating muscadines and scuppernongs off the vines in my backyard. my parents came up to visit last weekend and brought me a big container of 'em, as well as a few jars of last year's jelly. it's funny - muscadine jelly was the first jelly/jam i ever made, and, to this day, it tastes like childhood to me. more clearly than any other flavor from my childhood, i can remember the taste of scuppernongs, still hot from the sun - really remember it, as though my mouth remembers it, not just my mind - and the way the kitchen smelled when we were boiling the juice for jelly. isn't it interesting how many memories are linked to food? thanks for this post, faith; i enjoyed it.
My brother has a good, old-fashioned yard. There's almost always something worth eating growing in it. Last week, it was muscadines, and I enjoyed them greatly.
Muscadines and scuppernongs are one of those things that nearly every family had in their yard when I was a little girl in Georgia, but fewer and fewer people seem to be planting them now. Not many people are putting in fig bushes or pecan trees, either, in the neighborhoods that are sprouting up in the pastures and timber yards.
I can't put my finger on why exactly it bothers me that people choose crepe myrtles over fig bushes, but it does.
They make for good juice and ice cream flavoring too. Still sweet, but more earthy and complex than your standard grape.