The best grape jelly is homemade

By Yewande Komolafe, The New York Times

Food memories can sometimes run backward, to a moment when we first experienced entirely new sensations. This is not that story.

In the summer of 2010, I worked at Pies ’n’ Thighs, a Brooklyn, New York, restaurant focused on classic Southern comfort foods. One of my responsibilities was transforming that morning’s produce order into the basis for the day’s dishes. Over time, the fruits and vegetables that came my way helped me chart the changing season and experience the world outside our basement kitchen. And it was there that I first encountered Concord grapes, the deep purple fruit arriving in flats the very moment the season seemed to be peaking, the kitchen ovens making the mid-August humidity almost overwhelming.

Although I had never seen Concord grapes, I knew them, or at least how they resembled that “grape” flavor of so many sweets and beverages I’d tasted growing up in Lagos, Nigeria. We had grape jellies, stocked in markets that sold European confections, but I had never known a supermarket grape to taste that way. The Concord grapes were juicy, often sweeter than pears but not as sweet as berries. They had a musty quality, sometimes an earthiness, as if something of the vine itself were present in the fruit. When I tried my first one, picked from a ripened bunch in that basement kitchen, I had to adapt my memories. This was a real food that tasted like a flavor I believed was of purely artificial origin.