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Currant Jelly Without Cooking
Press the juice from the currants, and strain it; to every pint put a pound of fine white sugar; mix them together until the sugar is dissolved; then put it into jars; seal them and expose them to a hot sun for two or three days.
An uncooked, sun-set jelly that trades a firm gel for the raw flavour and colour of fresh fruit. It works because red currants are exceptionally high in both pectin and acid, but it behaves more like a refrigerator preserve than a shelf-stable one.
- The hinge: currants must be barely ripeThe hinge: use currants on the early side of ripe -- pectin and acid are generally highest just as the fruit colours, and very ripe currants are slower to set without heat. Red and white currants are the usual choice for this method.
- Ratio and quantitiesA pint is 2 cups of strained juice, a pound of sugar about 2 1/4 cups. "Fine white sugar" means finely granulated, not confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch. Something in the range of 2 to 3 lb of currants should give a pint of juice, or roughly 3 half-pint jars of finished jelly.
- Dissolving the sugarStir in stages over 20-30 minutes at room temperature until no grit remains on the bottom of the bowl. Undissolved sugar will crystallise in the jar and the jelly will weep.
- What "expose to a hot sun" is doingThe sun supplies gentle, sustained warmth to help the sugar dissolve fully and the pectin begin to set. Note that the original seals the jars first, so there is no evaporation involved. A sunny windowsill is the modern equivalent.
- Expect a soft setThis is a spoonable, loose jelly ehaves closer to a thick syrup than a cut-and-hold gel. Two or three days of sun may still leave it slack; that is normal for the method, not a failure.
- "Seal them" is not canningThere is no heat process here, so the jars are not shelf stable no matter how well they are closed. Use scalded jars, and once the jelly has set move it to the refrigerator and use it within a month, or freeze it.
- StrainingCrush the fruit, warm it only enough to release juice if you like, and let it drip through a jelly bag without squeezing. Pressing hard, as the original says, gives more juice but a cloudy jelly.
Sun preserves turn up in nineteenth-century American kitchens, and some general cookbooks of the period carry one: strawberries or currants mixed cold with sugar and set out on boards or in shallow dishes to thicken in the heat. The appeal was flavour and colour ehaves long boiling drives off the fresh taste of currants and dulls the red ehaves and the saving of fuel in a season when nobody wanted a hot stove. Red currants were a common dooryard fruit in the northern states and Britain, and their extreme tartness and pectin made them the fruit most likely to jelly on their own; currant jelly appears in these books not only as a preserve but as the standard accompaniment to game and mutton and as a base for sauces and cold drinks. Recipes of this kind faded as reliable water-bath canning, promoted heavily by home-economics extension work in the early twentieth century, made properly sealed and processed jars the expected standard.