){kind=small}
Verjuice, also known as verjus, is an ingredient which, in recent years, has made a bit of a comeback. Literally “green juice”, verjuice has most usually been made from unripe grapes, or from crab apples. I have also come across a reference to it being made from sour plums. A summer version (perhaps when the previous year’s verjuice had been used up) was made with gooseberries or even sorrel. It is not as sharp as vinegar and in recipes following its decline in the C19th, was replaced with “a squeeze of lemon”. It was used in dressings and sauces.
Verjuice was a popular ingredient in the medieval period. The monastery at Ely had extensive vineyards (prompting the Normans to refer to it as “isle des vignes”), producing wine and verjuice for the monks, and verjuice for sale outside the monastery. In the Elizabethan period verjuice was one of the ingredients of the standard broth for carp or pike, and was used in sauces for veal and bacon. It was also an ingredient in brawn (pickled pork shoulder meat, not the jellied head meat we know today) which was a traditional Christmas dish, and souse (pickled hind quarters of the pig). Thomas Tusser, in his C16th “Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry” describes crab apple verjuice as “so good for the kitchen, so needfull for beast”. (It appears to be a cure-all for cattle.) In his wonderfully named “Delightes for ladies: to adorn their persons, tables, closets, and distillatories with beauties, banquets, perfumes, and waters” 1602, Sir Hugh Plat gives a recipe for pickling broom buds in verjuice and bay salt (sea salt). Plat also gives interesting instructions for keeping “walnuts a long time plump and fresh”. This makes use of the crab apple mash left over once the verjuice has been pressed out. Walnuts are layered with the mash in a closed vessel.
Instructions for making crab apple verjuice appear in Eliza Smith’s C17th “The Compleat Housewife”. These instructions are repeated by Dorothy Hartley (“Food in England” 1954), Richard Mabey (“Food for Free” 1972), and Roger Phillips (“Wild Food” 1983). In “French Provincial Cooking” 1960, Elizabeth David gives instructions for making grape verjuice. The juice is squeezed from unripe grapes and left in shallow bowls for several days until a fermentation scum forms on the top. This scum is skimmed off and salt (which stops fermentation and acts as a preservative) is added. Maggie Beer, in “Cooking with Verjuice” 2001, gives rather simpler instructions. Pick the grapes while green (unripe), squeeze, and freeze the juice in ice cube trays. Her book contains interesting recipes, both savoury and sweet.
It is Maggie Beer, a winemaker and food writer from the Barossa Valley in South Australia, who has prompted the revival of verjuice. She and her husband began producing it. Maggie Beer’s and other verjuices from around the world have been available in this country periodically.
Monica Askay