Muscadines & Scuppernongs

I was reading an article in Bella grace magazine this morning. The author was talking about canning food with her friends. She reminisced to her childhood recalling her grandmothers garden, her canning and orderly stacked frizen and refrigerated earthen bounty.

Griwing up, we didn’t have a consistent garden or a farm to grow our own food on. However, each Labor Day weekend, we did go to Buck and Frances’s farm in Lexington, TN.

There was was always a hay ride. Buck pulled up his giant John Deer tractor with a wagon hitched to the back. Us kiddos would climb into the back and plop ourselves down on the hay bales, Buck would start her up, and we’d be off on a rickety, bumpy, narrated tour of The Farm.

Cows were on our route. Always. Horses. Crops. Ditches. Stories. The ride always ended at the pig pen. I remember the smell. Dirt. Mud. Stinky. However, I loved seeing the little piggies. If there were babies, I would hold a squealing piglet in my arms until its mama had had enough.

We’d run to the big barn across the field, climb up into the loft and look out over the little farmhouse and fertile fields of grain.

My my favorite part of this trip though was the picking of the muscadines and scuppernongs.

Muscadines are a dark, reddish purple with an intense sweetness and dense flesh. They taste somewhat like a red grape mixed with a plum, but the skin is rougher, thicker and spicier. The scent of a muscadine is unique. Undefinable. Instantly recognizable...but only if you’ve had one before.

Scuppernongs are larger than a typical muscadine, but they are the same species, just different colors. Scuppernongs are speckled and bronze. They have the same tough exterior, a similar taste and smell.

I can smell them now.

We’d run over to the vines to start pulling, picking and eating. Muscadines and scuppernongs aren’t in clusters. We snapped them off their thick, strong, twisted vines and dropped them one-by-one into our tin buckets until they were full.

The best part was heading into the humble farmhouse, across the porch laden with rockers and talkers, through the sitting room and into the tiny kitchen filled with women and buzzing with the sound of mashing and canning, the air filled with the scent of summer’s end...each wax seal of the Mason Jars confirming that school is just around the corner.

We we always took jars of Muscadine and Scuppernong jelly with us along with some canned corn, maybe some string beans and okra to boot.

A hint of farm life and sweetness lingered in our own home until the last drop of muscadine jelly was spread over top of freshly buttered and toasted bread.

Yum. I can taste it now. Almost. Maybe it’s time to relive that moment and spread my own bread with the succulent sweetness of America’s native grape!