SC - Verjus or Sour Grape Juice?

[david friedman]

At 9:35 AM -0700 5/3/99, lilinah at grin.net wrote:
>In the hopes that a wise person on this list may know...
>
>I was shopping in a Persian market that carries all manner of Near and
>Middle Eastern food for tasty stuff to take to the West's Beltane
>coronation weekend...
>
>and i saw bottles labelled "Sour Grape Juice" from Lebanon. Made from green
>grapes, the liquid was light in color, transparent, with slight layer of
>residue at the bottom.
>
>Could this be anything like verjus, which i've never seen or tasted, or
>just something different?

I think it is verjus; certainly we use it as such.

"Verjus" in the medieval european cookbooks seems to be a general term for
sour juice, most commonly from unripe grapes, sometimes from other things
(Robert May has a recipe using crab apples, for example). I saw a reference
in a modern Iranian source to the juice of unripe grapes; apparently they
get it as a byproduct of thinning the grapes before they are ripe. My guess
is that that was what was going on in the European middle ages as well.

David/Cariadoc
http://www.best.com/~ddfr/


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