Today in the Union Square Greenmarket, I went smelling for concord grapes. James loves them. Every year he picks up his first bunch of the season and is transported back to his childhood in Western New York. He tells me that the entire region smells like Concord grapes around this time of year.
To me, they smell like the grape jelly and grape juice that were not a part of my own childhood because my mother did not believe in peanut butter or fruit juice (we ate the actual fruit, and she thought peanut butter was icky). However, when I escaped from her influence and discovered the joys of PB&J on my own, I developed a taste for concord grapes too.
According to James, there is a right way to eat a concord grape. Let me share the way with you now:
You carefully remove a juicy grape off the stem;
You pop the whole grape into your mouth and mash it against your palate till the soft insides squeeze out of the tough skin;
You suck gently on the skin because the sweetest part of the grape is just below the surface;
You take a quick chomp on the skin to get a blast of the tartness;
You take a moment to appreciate the rubbery texture and superficial sweetness of the inside of the grape, but you do not bite into it because of the seeds; and finally
You swallow the grape and the skin, seeds and all.
Sure enough, as I walked through the market, I smelled that sweet, jelly smell a few feet before I came to a table covered in concord grapes from Locust Grove Fruit Farm. James and I sucked down a bunch for dessert tonight, and they were luscious.
~Karen Seiger, Markets of New York City
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