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Spiced Currants
Five pounds fruit, four pounds sugar, one pint vinegar, onehalf ounce cinnamon, one-half ounce cloves. Boil three hours.
A sweet-sour spiced preserve of the type nineteenth-century cooks served with cold meat rather than on toast. The proportions are sound; the method assumes knowledge the recipe does not supply.
- Which currantsThese are fresh Ribes currants, red or black, stemmed and weighed raw — not the dried Zante "currants" sold for baking. Five pounds is a large quantity; the recipe halves and quarters cleanly.
- Spice formHalf an ounce is roughly two tablespoons of ground cinnamon or cloves, which will make a gritty, muddy preserve. Many period spiced-fruit recipes call for whole stick cinnamon and whole cloves tied in a cloth bag, and that may be the better reading here; the recipe does not say which form it means. Cloves at this strength dominate quickly; taste and pull the bag early if it is aggressive.
- The vinegarThe recipe does not say what kind. Ordinary cider vinegar at the modern 5 percent acidity suits it; anything labelled as a specialty or reduced-acidity vinegar will alter both the flavour balance and the keeping quality.
- Three hours is too longPresumably written for a slow range and an open kettle, where evaporation was the point. On a modern burner, at four pounds of sugar to five of fruit, the mixture should reach setting consistency well short of three hours — roughly 45 minutes to an hour and a quarter. Judge by the mixture sheeting off a spoon or a thermometer reading near 220F at sea level, not by the clock, or you will get spiced currant cement.
- Pan and stirringUse a wide non-reactive pan — stainless or enamel, never bare aluminium or copper with this much vinegar. Stir often near the end; the sugar concentration climbs fast and the bottom scorches without warning.
- No storage instructions are givenTreat what you make as a refrigerator preserve, good for several weeks, or follow current tested water-bath canning guidance for the jars and processing time — the recipe supplies neither.
- Yield and servingExpect roughly four to five pints from the full quantity. It is a condiment, not a jam: it belongs beside cold ham, roast fowl, or tongue at a supper table.
Spiced fruit in vinegar and sugar was a fixture of the American supper table from the mid-nineteenth century onward — spiced peaches, spiced plums, spiced grapes, spiced currants, all built on the same skeleton of fruit, sugar, vinegar, cinnamon and cloves, and all intended to cut the richness of cold meat. The technique descends from much older English sweet pickling, itself an inheritance from the medieval taste for sharp, heavily spiced sauces served with roasts. Currants suited the method because they are naturally high in acid and pectin and ripen in a short summer glut that had to be dealt with at once. Their near-disappearance from American cooking came later: beginning in the early twentieth century, federal and state authorities restricted Ribes cultivation because the plants host white pine blister rust, and several generations of cooks grew up without ever seeing a fresh currant. The bans have since been lifted or loosened in most states, which is why recipes like this one read as unfamiliar rather than merely old-fashioned.