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Raspberries with Currant Juice
Ten pounds of red or black raspberries, twelve pounds of granulated sugar, one quart currant juice. Make syrup of the sugar and juice; when boiling add the fruit, and continue for ten minutes. Put in glass cans and fasten immediately.
Despite its place in the canning chapter, this is a preserve rather than canned fruit: at twelve pounds of sugar to ten of berries it is sweeter than most modern jams, and the currant juice is there for pectin and acid as much as for flavor.
- Scale it downTen pounds of berries and twelve of sugar makes a very large batch, well over a dozen pint jars. A fifth of the recipe — 2 lb berries, about 2 lb 6 oz sugar, and a scant cup of currant juice — is a manageable batch in a wide preserving pan.
- Why currant juiceRaspberries are low in pectin and only moderately acid. Red currants are high in both, so the juice does the work commercial liquid pectin was invented to do. Juice pressed from just-ripe or slightly underripe currants sets better than juice from overripe fruit.
- "Glass cans"These were early screw-top or wire-bail jars with rubber gaskets. Modern two-piece canning lids are the equivalent; fasten them fingertip-tight, not forced.
- Sealing method has changedFilling hot and sealing at once — open-kettle canning — is no longer recommended. Current practice is to fill hot jars to within 1/4 inch of the rim and process in a boiling-water bath, which guards against the mold and yeast that spoil open-kettle preserves in storage. Follow a current tested procedure for the processing step.
- The ten minutesTen minutes at a full boil is enough to cook the berries through without collapsing them, which is the point of adding fruit to finished syrup rather than cooking both together. Expect a soft, loose set, closer to a spoon fruit than a stiff jam.
- SkimA heavy-sugar syrup with fruit in it throws a good deal of foam. Skim it off before jarring or the preserve looks cloudy and the surface may develop a scum in the jar.
- Wide pan, no lidBoil in the widest pan you have, uncovered. A deep narrow pot boils over at this sugar concentration and evaporates too little in ten minutes.
- ServingFar too sweet to eat as stewed fruit. Treat it as a preserve for toast, hot biscuits, rice pudding, or spooned over plain cake.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) appeared just as the glass fruit jar with a rubber-gasketed lid was becoming cheap enough for ordinary households, and its canning chapter reflects that moment: recipes are given in large lots, on the assumption that a family put up a summer's fruit at once rather than a jar or two at a time. Commercial pectin was still decades off, so a cook working with a low-pectin fruit borrowed acid and setting power from another — currant juice for raspberries, apple for grape. Red currants ripen alongside raspberries in the northern states where this book was compiled, which made the pairing a matter of the garden calendar as much as chemistry.