In Season

Fragrant baskets of muscadine grapes are now appearing at farmers markets and in grocery stores.

Muscadines are our native Southern grapes. Large fruited, spicy sweet, their thick skins come in shades of purple and bronze.

The bronze varieties are often called scuppernongs, although that name properly refers only to the first named variety of muscadine, found growing wild in northeastern North Carolina in 1810.

Michelle Goodman and her husband Will are the owners of Oakton House in Marietta, built in 1838 by a family from Savannah looking to escape the coastal summer heat and humidity.

Will Goodman’s grandparents bought the house in 1939. The original kitchen gardens and orchard now supply Michelle Goodman with a bounty of fruits and vegetables to sell on Saturday mornings at the Marietta Square Farmers Market.

For fall she’ll be selling heirloom tomatoes, apples, cut flowers, herbs, ornamental gourds, pumpkins, Indian corn, lots of fresh basil and boxes of muscadines.

Goodman started selling at the Marietta market three years ago.

“I kept coming in with bushel baskets of produce and thought ‘What am I going to do with all this stuff?’ There’s only so much you can pass along to your neighbors,” she said.

She set up a booth at the market on a trial basis and has been there ever since.

In their garden, an arbor covered with seven-year-old muscadine vines provides a shady respite.

“It’s always 10 degrees cooler under there. We set out tables and serve hors d’oeuvres and cocktails. It’s wonderful,” she said.

That shady arbor also makes a pleasant place to harvest the muscadines she takes to market.

“I find that people who haven’t grown up in the South don’t know what these are, but Southerners know and love them. They buy our boxes and just pop the grapes right in their mouths. I think they eat them all before they even get home,” said Goodman.

Cultivated muscadines, like the ones Goodman grows, are sweet and juicy. The seeds can be bitter, so those familiar with the fruit advise spitting them out or just swallowing them whole.

If your muscadines make it home, they’ll keep for up to a week in your refrigerator. Don’t wash until you’re ready to eat or cook with them.

Many Atlanta chefs enjoy cooking with muscadines.

Steven Satterfield of Miller Union likes to use a centrifugal juicer to make muscadine juice.

“You can drink it on its own or use it to deglaze a pan or add to a sauce. I like sautéing quail in butter with a little ginger and country ham and then deglazing the pan with muscadine juice to make a sauce from the pan drippings that is both sweet and savory,” said Satterfield.

Satterfield also offered a great tip for dealing with those bitter seeds.

“I take an old fork — we all have a random one in our silverware drawer, right? — and bend down the outer tines with a pair of pliers. The remaining two tines in the center make an excellent tool for seeding muscadines,” he said.