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Dried Currants
One pint sugar to a pint of stemmed ripe currants; put them together in a porcelain kettle, a layer of currants at the bottom; when the sugar is dissolved, let them boil one or two minutes, skim from the syrup, and spread on plates to dry in a partly cooled oven. Boil the syrup until thickened, pour it over the currants, and dry it with them. Pack in jars and cover closely. Blackberries may be dried in the same manner. An economical way of making jelly is to boil liquid, skimming well, after currants are taken out, until it becomes jelly, and then put away in jelly glasses.
In making pickles use none but the best cider vinegar, and boil in a porcelain kettle-never in metal. A lump of alum size of a small nutmeg, to a gallon of cucumbers, dissolved and added to the vinegar when scalding the pickles the first time, renders them crisp and tender, but too much is injurious. Keep in a dry, cool cellar, in glass or stoneware; look at them frequently and remove all soft ones; if white specks appear in the vinegar, drain off and scald, adding a liberal handful of sugar to each gallon, and pour again over the pickles; bits of horse-radish and a few cloves assist in preserving the life of the vinegar. If put away in large stone jars, invert a saucer over the top of the pickles, so as to keep them well under the vinegar. The nicest way to put up pickles is bottling, sealing while hot, and keeping in a cool, dark place. Many think that mustard-seed improves pickles, especially chopped, bottled, and mangoes, but use it, as well as horse-radish and cloves, sparingly. Never put up pickles in any thing that has held any kind of grease, and never let them freeze. Use an oaken tub or cask for pickles in brine, keep them well under, and have more salt than will dissolve, so that there will always be plenty at the bottom of the cask. The brine for pickles should be strong enough to bear an egg; make it in the proportion of a heaping pint of coarse salt to a gallon of water. Use coarse salt, and test pickles by tasting before putting on vinegar (they should be of a pleasant saltness); if not salt enough, add salt to brine and allow them to stand until they have acquired the proper flavor; if too salt, cover with weak vinegar, and let stand for two or three days, drain, adding strong vinegar, either hot or cold according to recipes, and finish as directed. In the case of kegs of cucumbers kept in brine for a long time, to be used when needed, it is better to err in using too much salt, as this may be corrected by adding the weak vinegar, but if not sufficiently salted the pickles will be insipid. In scalding (254) cucumber pickles to green them, some use cabbage leaves, covering bottom, sides, and top of kettle. A medium spicing for a quart of pickles is a level tea-spoon of peppercorns (whole black peppers), the same of allspice, a table-spoon of broken stick cinnamon, half a tea-spoon of cloves, mustard seed, or horse-radish chopped fine, and one piece of ginger root, an inch long. If ground cayenne pepper is used instead of whole peppers, an eighth of a tea-spoon is enough. A better substitute for peppercorns is garden-peppers cut in rings, in proportion of two rings of green and one of red without seeds, or a level tea-spoon, when finely chopped, to a quart of pickles. These proportions may be increased or decreased to suit the taste, taking care not to put in so much of any one as to make its flavor predominate. Ginger is the most wholesome of the spices. Cloves are the strongest, mace next, then allspice and cinnamon, and, of course, less of the stronger should be used. Pickles are not famous for wholesome qualities, even when made with the greatest care, but if they must be eaten, it is best to make them at home. Those sold in market are often colored a beautiful green with sulphate of copper, which is a deadly poison, or are cooked in brass or copper vessels, which produces the same result in an indirect way. Scalding or parboiling articles to be pickled makes them absorb the vinegar more easily, but does not add to their crispness. Before putting them in vinegar, after parboiling, they should be cold and perfectly dry. Always use strong vinegar, or the pickles will be insipid, and it should be scalding hot when poured on, as raw vinegar becomes ropy and does not keep well. As heating weakens it, vinegar for pickles should be very strong, and should only be brought to boiling point, and immediately poured on pickles. Keep pickles from the air, and see that the vinegar is at least two inches over the top of pickles in the jar. A dry wooden spoon or ladle should be used in handling pickles, and is the only one that should touch pickles in the jars. If the vinegar loses its strength it should be replaced by good, poured over scalding hot.
The recipe proper is the first four lines: a sugar-glazed dried currant, closer to what a modern cook would call candied or glacé fruit than to a plain dried berry. Everything after "Blackberries may be dried in the same manner" is the book's general essay on pickling, printed here as a run-on continuation of the page.
- Porcelain kettleThis means a porcelain-enamelled iron pan, not ceramic. Any non-reactive pan works — stainless or enamelled cast iron. The insistence is real: currants are acidic enough to pick up metallic flavour from bare iron or aluminium.
- Pint for pintMeasured by volume, not weight. A pint of granulated sugar is about 14 oz (400 g); a pint of stemmed red currants runs 11-12 oz (320 g). So this is a heavy sugar ratio, which is what makes the fruit keep.
- "When the sugar is dissolved"Do not add water. Layer sugar and currants and leave the pan over low heat until the fruit gives up enough juice to make a syrup, then bring it up. Rushing this scorches the sugar at the bottom before there is any liquid.
- One or two minutes onlyThis is the hinge. Currants have thin skins and burst almost instantly; more than a brief boil and you have jam with nothing left to lift out onto plates.
- A partly cooled ovenAn oven that has finished baking and is falling. The book gives no temperature; in practice this would be a slack heat, probably somewhere under 200°F (95°C), with the door propped ajar so moisture escapes. A modern oven set to its lowest mark, or a dehydrator at 135-145°F, does the same job over several hours.
- Boiling the syrup until thickenedTake it to about 220°F (104°C), the ordinary jelly point. Poured back over the fruit and dried with it, it forms the sticky coating that seals each berry.
- The jelly by-productRed currants are among the highest-pectin fruits, which is why the leftover liquid sets with no added pectin and no lemon. Skim well; unskimmed scum makes cloudy jelly.
- Yield and keepingA pint of currants yields roughly a cup of finished glazed fruit — use it as you would candied peel, in cakes, buns and sweetmeat plates. "Cover closely" matters more than the book says: these are semi-dried, not fully dry, and they mould if any humidity reaches them. A cool, dark cupboard and airtight glass, checked in the first few weeks.
- The pickling notesTreat them as period reading, not as a procedure. Brine strength judged by floating an egg, cucumbers held in open crocks for months, and vinegar of unstated acidity are all outside modern tested canning practice; use a current tested recipe if you intend to put up pickles. The book's own warning about market pickles greened with sulphate of copper was a live concern in the 1870s and was among the abuses that later food-adulteration laws addressed.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping came out of central Ohio in the late 1870s, compiled from contributions by Methodist churchwomen, and its preserves chapter reflects a household that had to convert a short, glutted fruit season into something that would last the winter. Red currants (Ribes rubrum) were a standard dooryard bush in the northern states then, cropping heavily in early summer and too tart to eat out of hand, so almost everything done with them involved sugar. Drying fruit in a cooling brick oven after the day's baking was simply thrift — the heat was already paid for. Currants themselves largely disappeared from American gardens in the twentieth century, when states began restricting Ribes plantings because the bushes host white pine blister rust, which is why a recipe that once assumed a bush by the back door now reads as unfamiliar; the restrictions have since been relaxed in many places, and fresh currants are again appearing at farmers' markets in July.