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To Dry Currants
Berries and other fruits are sometimes dried with sugar and heat. The directions for currants will also serve for other fruits: Take equal weights of stemmed currants and sugar. Let them boil together for one minute, then carefully skim the currants from the liquor, and spread on dishes to dry. Dry them in the oven. The remaining syrup may be used for jelly.
A candying method rather than a true drying one: the minute in boiling syrup sets the sugar in the fruit, and the oven only finishes the job. The whole thing hinges on getting the berries out of the syrup fast, before their skins burst.
- Which currantsThese are fresh red, white or black currants on the strig, not the dried Zante currants sold in boxes. Stemming means stripping the berries off the stalks, most easily done by running a fork down each cluster.
- Equal weightsWeigh the fruit after stemming and match it with the same weight of granulated sugar — roughly 1 lb fruit to about 2 1/4 cups sugar. No added water is called for.
- The one minute is literalTime it from the moment the syrup comes to a full boil. Longer and the skins split and the berries collapse into jam, which is why the recipe says to skim them out carefully with a slotted spoon rather than pouring the pan out.
- Oven heatThe book says only 'in the oven' and gives no temperature. Use the lowest setting your oven offers, 150–175F, with the door propped ajar on a wooden spoon so moisture escapes; much above that and the sugared fruit darkens and goes hard rather than drying.
- Timing and donenessExpect 4 to 8 hours on parchment-lined trays, turning the berries once or twice. They are done when they are leathery and tacky rather than wet, and no juice beads out when squeezed.
- "Spread on dishes"Read this as shallow plates or platters. Baking sheets lined with parchment work better, and a wire rack set inside the sheet better still, since air reaching the underside cuts the drying time noticeably.
- The leftover syrupIt is a currant syrup carrying some of the fruit's pectin, and red currants are acid and pectin-rich enough that it will often set with little help — strain it, bring to 220F, and pour into small sterilised jars. Fruits lower in pectin and acid treated the same way may not set.
- Yield and keepingThe dried fruit weighs well under the fresh weight. Store in a sealed jar and check the first week for condensation; if any appears, return the fruit to the low oven.
Sugar-drying, or candying, was one of the oldest ways of holding fruit through the winter, and this brisk little entry is the tail end of a tradition that ran from Elizabethan banqueting sweetmeats through the sugared "comfits" and conserves of eighteenth-century still-rooms. Currants take the lead here because they were a fixture of the American and British kitchen garden — and full of pectin — before white pine blister rust laws drove Ribes plantings out of much of the United States in the early twentieth century, which is a large part of why fresh currants are unfamiliar to many cooks today. The closing line about the leftover syrup is the book's real character showing: nothing that has had sugar boiled into it gets thrown away.