FOOD SPECIAL..TABLE GRAPES

Sugar Bombs

Table grapes may not have the glamour of their wine counterparts, but they're a veritable treat

Around February-March each year I try to visit the wineries in Nashik. This is when the grapes are harvested and it's a good time to talk to the winemakers about the prospects for their wine. But I have to admit that the sneakier reason for going is simply to eat the grapes, either freshly harvested and waiting to be crushed, or sometimes plucked directly from the vineyards, about to be harvested, or the few late ripening bunches that can usually be found concealed among the leaves.
The grape varietals used for wine taste wonderful, even though they tend to be small and full of seeds. A lot of the special flavours of different wines comes from the skin, as does all the colour in red wine, so the grapes usually have less flesh than table varieties, where skin and seeds are an irritant. But wine grapes have more sugar, since they need this for the fermentation, so what you get is an intensely sweet burst that is complemented by a range of other flavours from the skin, but there's not much juice and you either have to swallow or spit out the skin and pips soon.
Driving through Nashik district you also see table grapes, either in the final stage of ripening on the vines (for some varieties with large fruit, the farmers painstakingly cover each bunch with paper, which looks striking) or sold in bulk by the roadside. There are piles of green grapes, mostly Thompson's Seedless, or black ones, which are varieties like Sonaka. The large Red Globe grapes, which are newer in Nashik, are treated as luxuries, so aren't sold casually, but carefully packed in plastic boxes.
I felt a bit guilty as I drove past these piles, because I realised I was doing exactly what everyone has always done to table grapes — overlooked their modest, but very real, virtues, in favour of the glamour of wine grapes. In nearly all the literature on grapes, in all the courses on growing them, the research devoted to them, the histories written on them, wine grapes dominate and table grapes are mentioned just in passing. Nashik has been growing excellent table grapes for ages, but it was only when wine grapes started to be grown that people like me started travelling there.
Yet, as I was reminded when I was back in Mumbai and had stocked up on both green and black table grapes, they can be so good. They may not be as sweet as wine grapes, but they are still among the sweetest of fruits, real sugar bombs at times, but with enough acid to stop the sweetness from being cloying. This sugar and acid means they also last quite well. Unlike berry fruits, which seem to start rotting almost as you look at them, grapes can stay good for a while as long as they are kept dry. People like the Greeks and Romans who valued them devised ways to store grapes suspended, so they stayed good for weeks (or dried into raisins, which were good in another way).
The juiciness of table grapes also makes them one of the most refreshing fruits, but the liquid is well-contained in the little sweet bullets, so you can eat them without messing your hands and clothes. This, combined with the cheapness of the basic green and black varieties in season, is what makes them popular as a roadside snack. Hawkers selling fruit come in two types — the one with stands that sell a range of the more expensive fruit, and the ones with carts which sell just one type of fruit, but cheap and in large quantities. The fruits sold by the latter, like bananas, guavas and jack-fruit, are rarely sold by the other type of seller, but grapes are one of the few that cross over, appreciated by the buyer of more expensive fruit, as well as the less affluent buyer just looking for a cheap, refreshing snack.
Table grapes are best eaten by themselves. Even fruit salads drown their simple pleasures with more attention grabbing fruit. Their sweet acidity is used in a few classic dishes to balance rich ingredients like duck's liver or sole, but recently in Old Delhi I tried something that sounds unlikely, but really worked. A friend took me to Jain Coffee House, a hole in the wall place famous for its fruit sandwiches. They had chikoo, pineapple and apple sandwiches when I went and I had the first.
It was simply two slices of white bread that held slivers of chikoo, a slice of plain paneer for contrast and then a row of sliced green grapes (I think there was also a thin layer of syrup, either on the bread or the fruit). This weird combination worked quite wonderfully well and I think the controlled juiciness of the table grapes were key to it, even if, as usual, they were playing second fiddle to the other fruit. Table grapes may be happy in supporting roles — all the more reason to value them.
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