Yes there is such a thing as grape pie - but ...

"Rarely do grapes make it to the cooker, the majority being eaten straight from the vine." Nigel Slater"

It was just a throway line at the end of yesterday's post - are there grape pies? - but then today I thought I should find out if there are. And yes there are. Well there seems to be just the one really - Concord grape pie - the Dish 'n' the Kitchen shown here, which is a speciality of the west of New York state centred around the town of Naples.

At first I thought Concord was probably a place but no apparently it's the name of a specific kind of grape - small, black, seedless, a tiny bit tart, and with a thick skin.

Sometimes the pie has a lattice top as shown here, sometimes it has a full pie crust, but basically it's just the fruit plus sugar and maybe some kind of spice - like nutmeg - baked in a pie. The grapes are not skinned.

Then there's American-style grape slab pie which is a little thinner. This version is from Claire Ptak, one of the The Guardian's columnists. It also uses the concord grape, and her version also includes apples. It's pretty horrendous to make however - well at least her version - best demonstrated by this paragraph in the recipe:

"To make the filling, stem the grapes, then separate the skins from the pulp by pinching each grape to squeeze out the pulp. Set aside the skins. Heat the pulp along with the scraped vanilla bean and seeds, plus the lemon zest, in a heavy saucepan until it is soft and beginning to separate from the grape seeds (about 10 minutes). Pour the pulp through a mesh sieve placed over a bowl. Press through with a plastic pastry scraper or the back of a wooden spoon until all the pulp is in the bowl. Discard the grape seeds. Rinse and dry out the vanilla bean for another purpose. Add the lemon juice to the pulp."

To be fair she did warn that it was a bit of a faff to make. I checked at least two other recipes and that is indeed the way it's done. An incredible cheffy kind of process for a rustic kind of dish.

Many, many years ago I made this Fresh grape tart from another of Robert Carrier''s cookery cards. You had to peel the green grapes. It took me forever, and halfway through I wondered why one earth I was doing it. There's that quote from somewhere "Peel me a grape" isn't there, that is representative of decadence and possibly even slavery? Well it certainly felt like that, and I swore never to make it again. My one Robert Carrier failure - well not a failure - it tasted fine, but a failure in the sense of the process.

The recipes I found for the slab pies said you peeled the grapes by just pinching the grapes to squeeze out the pulp, but I bet it isn't that simple. I think I had to peel my grapes with a small knife - different grapes, but still.

And that was it for pies, until I then thought to look for a savoury pie - beginning with chicken because I knew there were various braised chicken with grapes recipes. And lo and behold Maggie Beer has a Chicken, grape and champagne pie on the ABC website, It looks great, but you can't see the inside - so it's just a pie. Apparently it's from her book Maggie's Kitchen. I then found Pork, ham, apple and grape pie with crispy gruyère potato top and sesame salsa from Alex Owen on the We Eat with our Eyes First Facebook page - but just the pictures, and not even a description - still it shows you can be imaginative I guess. Finally on the Store-bought is Fine Instagram page there was Duck confit pie with potatoes, grapes and shallots which apparently is from a book - Big Heart, Little Stove by Erin French.

So at this point I gave up on pies. Nigel tells us that: "Grapes can be cooked too, though they tend to lose any subtlety of flavour" which might be part of the reason why they're not a good choice for a pie, but Google's AI was even more cutting:

"We don't cook grapes often because they are mostly water and have fragile skins, which causes them to burst and turn mushy in baked goods like pies."

However I couldn't give up there. I knew from Robert Carrier's recipe that they could feature on tarts - particularly if the uncooked grapes were just sitting on some creamy filling - like all those glorious French fruit tarts. I also knew that you could roast them - a modern trend for just about every fruit and vegetable that exists and that has so much potential for experimentation. So here are a few that I found - beginning with the most, shall we say, conventional: Grape tarts - Ricardo Cuisine; Grape, ricotta and honey tarts - Gemma Purcell/Taste; Savoury fig and grape tart - Australian Table Grape Association; with the prize for this group going to Coles and their Grape frangipane tart 

Then there are three 'different' ones - the most radical being Ottolenghi with his Caramelised fennel and grape tart tatin with saffron and olives but it does look stunning; Agrodolce grape tart with goat’s feta, pancetta and witlof salad from Emma Knowles/Gourmet Traveller and Roasted red grape and rosemary tart - Mother Would Know - simple but making the best of the roasting process.

In another direction altogether - to Italy and yeast doughs we have Jamie Oliver's Grape and hazelnut pizza and Nigel's Black grape foccacia - traditional Italian dish for grape growers. But they don't really count do they?

So we give it to the Americans for turning grapes into pies, everyone for tarts where there seems to be rather more imagination and the Italians for combining them with bread dough.

Pies? Yes, but probably not that great and potentially too much work. Better to just snack on them every time you go past the fridge.

YEARS GONE BY

July 6

2025 - Nothing

2024 - Nothing

2023 - Meatloaf or terrine or ...?

2022 - Why Madhur Jaffrey is the queen of Indian cooking

2021 - Missing

2020 - Missing

2019 - Marinated artichoke hearts

2018 - Where does it come from?

2017 - On holiday