Ethyl Remembers: Muscadine Time

It's Autumn.  Well, not quite, but there is a change in the weather that lets you know it's coming. And in my opinion, not nearly soon enough.  The oppressing heat that marked this summer in Memphis for all intents and purposes is past.  It's still in the nineties here today, but believe it or not, it actually feels somewhat cool after the summer we've had.  And there is just a feel in the air.  Can't quite describe it, you just have to know the feel.  Change is on the horizon.

Which brings me to the next memory.  Muscadine time.  I mentioned muscadines to the owners of an inn we were visiting in Nova Scotia and, to my surprise, discovered they had absolutely no idea what I was talking about.  Growing up in Tishomingo County, muscadines were as common as ants at a picnic.  They grew wild in the woods, climbing to the tops of massive trees and producing their sweet, tart, tangy fruit in abundance.  And the Fall was the time for gathering them. We gathered them in large milk buckets and pails, and collected them in our skirt tails, and whatever else we could find to put them in.  We often returned home with the skirts of our dresses permanently stained from where we had bunched them up to our waist and filled them with the deep purple fruit of the muscadine.  After all, just a walk in the Autumn woods was enough to come upon an undiscovered vine, and there was no way we were going to let it's succulent fruit lay on the ground underneath and rot.  It would be gathered and taken home, even at the expense of the few dresses we possessed.

Once home these wild grapes of the woods would be turned into preserves and jelly and even wine.  My mother had a large churn in which she brewed her sweet intoxicating nectar from the fruit of the muscadine vine.  Once properly distilled, we children were allowed to take tiny taste of the sweet spirits.  Never very much, just tiny sips.  It was a taste like no other, totally impossible to describe unless you've experienced it.  Sweet, yet tart,  stronger than cultivated grapes, but resembling them in nature, brisk and uplifting, yet never overpowering. 

The preserves were unique too, in that they were made from the hulls of the muscadine.  Unlike commercial grapes, the wild muscadines had a tough outer peel,  so when the fruit was to be eaten it was placed between your teeth and then the inside popped into your mouth, at which point you spit out the hull and savored the tart, tangy sweetness of the pulp inside.  Jelly could be made two ways.  You could boil the whole fruit and then strain the juice to make dark purple jelly, or you could divide the hull and the center by popping each fruit separately between your fingers,  at which point you could make preserves from the hulls and light colored jelly from the juice of the centers.  When I was growing up, I much perfered the dark jelly.  Not only was it more robust, it also saved us the time and bother of having to pop out all those juicy pulps by hand.

The woods around our house were always a place of delight in the fall.  The smell of leaves just before the decay sets in, pine fragrances lingering in the brisk fall air, heavy, yet refreshing; colors to please even the most discerning taste;  tiny little chill bumps on our arms and legs from the breezes that blew among the trees.

The sheer joy of finding wild muscadines among the fallen debris covering the ground. 

Such a nice memory to call up and reflect on.  Back from the days of long ago.  Days when we gathered the wild bounty of the woods,  took it home, and preserved it for the coming winter.  As I said, such a nice memory.