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Currant Pickles
Scald seven pounds ripe currants in three pounds sugar and one quart vinegar, remove currants to jar, boil for a few moments and pour over the fruit. Some add three pounds of raisins and spices. If not sweet enough, use only one pint vinegar.
A sweet pickle of the kind meant to sit beside cold meat, not to be eaten as jam. The whole method turns on gentle heat: currants boiled hard collapse to seedy mush.
- Scald, do not boilBring the sugar and vinegar to a simmer, add the currants, and hold them just below a boil until the skins go translucent, a few minutes at most. Only the drained syrup gets the hard boil afterward.
- Weights in cupsSeven pounds of red currants is roughly 6 quarts of stemmed fruit; three pounds of sugar is about 6 3/4 cups. A quart of vinegar is 4 cups, a pint 2 cups.
- Vinegar strengthNineteenth-century cider vinegar varied widely and was often weaker than what is sold now. Use a standard 5 percent cider or white wine vinegar, and treat the final line as the author intended it: cutting the vinegar to a pint makes the pickle sweeter, not safer.
- Sourcing the fruitFresh red currants appear briefly in midsummer at farmers' markets; frozen currants work and need no thawing, though they will shed more juice. Strip them from the strigs with a fork before weighing.
- The raisins and spicesSweet pickles of this sort were commonly spiced with stick cinnamon, whole cloves and allspice tied in cloth, sometimes a blade of mace, with dark seeded raisins; the recipe itself specifies none of this. Add any spice bag to the syrup and pull it before jarring, or the cloves take over.
- Reducing the syrup"Boil for a few moments" is short: currants are high in pectin and acid, so the syrup can thicken fast and may set once cold. Stop while it still pours freely from a spoon.
- Yield and keepingThe recipe gives no sealing or processing instruction, so treat the result as a refrigerator pickle in clean jars rather than a shelf-stable preserve, and use it within a couple of months.
- ServingA spoonful goes with roast pork, ham, cold mutton or game, or on a cheese board. It is far too sharp to eat by the dish.
Sweet pickles run through the pickle material in Buckeye Cookery (1877) because a late nineteenth-century table expected something sharp and sugary alongside heavy roasted and boiled meat, and the same sugar-and-vinegar syrup was applied indiscriminately to peaches, pears, crab apples, melon rind and, as here, soft fruit. Currants were a fixture of American kitchen gardens at the time, productive, reliably hardy and too tart to eat out of hand, which made them ideal for jelly, shrub, wine and pickles. Their near-disappearance from American cooking came later: Ribes species host white pine blister rust, and state and federal restrictions on planting them in the early twentieth century broke the habit for generations. The instruction to cut the vinegar if the pickle is "not sweet enough" is a reminder that the sweet-to-sour balance was a matter of household taste rather than formula.