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Mother's Currant Jelly
Before the currants ripened, grass was cut and spread quite thickly beneath the bushes, that the rain might not splash earth upon the fruit. With a pestle crush the currants on the stems in a mixing bowl, then turn, a few at a time, into a cloth and squeeze out all the juice.
Turn the juice into a clean cloth and let hang on a hook until the juice has dripped through the cloth. Let boil twenty minutes, after boiling begins. Add a cup of sugar for each cup of juice taken and let boil two or three minutes.
Heat the sugar in the oven.
Jelly from Currant Pulp Uncooked currants from which the juice has been taken by pressure may be cooked with apples or apple juice to make good flavored jelly. Canned apple juice may be available for the purpose. To the residue in the bag, add one or two quarts of apple juice; let boil twenty minutes after boiling begins; drain in a cloth; add three fourths a cup of sugar made hot in the oven for each cup of apple juice, and let boil about five minutes, or until the syrup jellies.
A two-stage jelly that wastes nothing: the free-run juice makes the clear jelly, and the pressed pulp is extended with apple juice for a second, softer batch. Red currants are so high in both pectin and acid that no commercial pectin is wanted here.
- The hinge: don't squeeze the hanging bagThe recipe presses the fruit first, then hangs that juice in a second clean cloth to drip. That second drip is what gives clear jelly. Wringing the bag forces fine pulp through and the finished jelly turns cloudy.
- Test for set, don't trust the clock"Boil two or three minutes" after the sugar goes in follows the twenty-minute boil of the juice, so the timing depends on your pan and how far the juice has reduced. Go by temperature instead: 220F at sea level, or the sheet test where the last drops off a cold spoon run together and fall in a sheet.
- Heating the sugarThe recipe says only to heat the sugar in the oven and gives no temperature; a low oven, sugar spread on a tray, is enough. Warm sugar dissolves quickly and does not knock the boil down.
- Quantities are openNo weight of currants is given. As a rough working figure, about 4 lb of currants yields in the region of 3 cups of juice, and each cup of juice with its cup of sugar fills roughly a half-pint jar. Yields vary with how hard the fruit is pressed.
- Stems and allCrushing the fruit on the stems is what the recipe calls for, and the stems are strained out anyway. Do not spend an evening stripping them.
- Grass under the bushesA clean mulch to keep rain from splashing soil onto the fruit. Straw does the same job. If your currants are gritty, rinse and drain them well before crushing, since washed fruit dilutes the juice only slightly.
- The second batchApple juice here means unsweetened cloudy juice or fresh-pressed cider, not clarified sweetened apple juice from a carton. Its pectin plus the currant residue is what sets the batch; note that the recipe calls for three fourths of a cup of sugar per cup of apple juice rather than the full cup used for the currant juice.
- SealingThe recipe gives no instructions for filling or sealing. Current practice is to fill sterilized half-pint jars to a quarter-inch of the top, wipe the rims, apply two-piece lids and process in a boiling water bath for 5 minutes. Paraffin is no longer recommended.
Currant jelly was a mainstay of American preserving in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and for good reason: red currants carry enough natural pectin and acid to set with nothing but sugar and heat, at a time when packaged pectin was a recent arrival. It was eaten with mutton, venison and game as much as with bread. The detail about grass spread under the bushes places this firmly in a household with its own fruit garden rather than a market shopper, and the second-extraction jelly from the spent pulp reflects the same thrift. Currant growing was curtailed across much of the United States in the early twentieth century, when Ribes species were found to host white pine blister rust and federal and state bans followed; those restrictions were relaxed only decades later, which is why the fruit is common in old preserving books and scarce in modern ones.