Home › Preserving › Spiced Currants
Spiced Currants
For each pound of currants allow a pound of sugar. Make a syrup, using for each four pounds of sugar, one pint of vinegar, two teaspoonfuls cinnamon, one scant teaspoonful cloves, one half teaspoonful mace or nutmeg, and one fourth teaspoonful salt. When the syrup boils, add the currants and let cook about ten minutes; skim out the currants and let the syrup boil till quite thick, then add the currants and store as jelly. Black currants are good spiced. Gooseberries may also be prepared by this recipe.
A sweet-sour spiced preserve of the type served alongside cold meat and game rather than spread on toast. The recipe is written as a ratio, so it scales to whatever quantity of fruit you have.
- The ratio, unpackedEqual weights fruit and sugar; for every 4 lb of that sugar, 1 pint (2 cups) vinegar and the listed spices. For 1 lb of currants and 1 lb of sugar, that works out to 1/2 cup vinegar, 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon, a scant 1/4 teaspoon cloves, about 1/8 teaspoon mace or nutmeg and a pinch of salt.
- Vinegar strengthHousehold vinegar strengths were variable; use a standard 5% cider or white wine vinegar. Do not substitute a low-acid "drinking" vinegar or a diluted one, since the acid plus sugar is what keeps the preserve.
- Cook the fruit briefly, then reduce the syrup aloneThis is the hinge of the recipe. Ten minutes is enough for the currants; lifting them out while the syrup reduces keeps them whole instead of collapsing into jam. Skimming out several pounds of small berries is easier with a fine wire skimmer or by cooking them in a muslin-lined sieve set in the pan.
- How thick is "quite thick"Boil the syrup to about 220F (104C) at sea level, or until it sheets off a cold spoon. Currants are exceptionally high in pectin, so the syrup will set firmly once cool; stop short of a hard crack or the finished preserve will be stiff and dull.
- Ground spices cloud the syrupFor a clear result, tie whole spices in cheesecloth and remove them before jarring. Whole cloves are strong; if the "scant teaspoonful" is read as ground, a rough equivalent is somewhere around eight to a dozen whole cloves per 4 lb sugar.
- "Store as jelly"In this period that typically meant hot into sterilised glasses sealed with melted paraffin, a method no longer recommended because the wax seal fails invisibly. Fill hot half-pint jars, leave 1/4 inch headspace and process 10 minutes in a boiling-water bath, or simply refrigerate and use within a couple of months.
- Gooseberries and black currantsTop and tail gooseberries first and expect them to need the full ten minutes or slightly more; black currants have tougher skins and their flavour stands up to the cloves better than red. Prick or lightly crush a few if they resist taking up syrup.
- Yield and servingA pound of currants with a pound of sugar gives roughly two to three half-pints. Serve with cold ham, roast pork, venison, or a sharp hard cheese rather than at breakfast.
Spiced fruit belongs to a large family of sweet-sour preserves that filled the place now occupied by chutney and cranberry sauce: fruit cooked with sugar, vinegar and warm spices to cut the richness of cold roast meat. Currants were a natural candidate because they are tart, very high in pectin and were widely grown in American kitchen gardens of the period, ripening in a short summer glut that had to be dealt with at once. The black currant mentioned in passing here would soon become much harder to find in the United States: from the 1910s onward, states began banning Ribes plantings because they host white pine blister rust, and black currants largely dropped out of American cooking for most of a century. Recipes of this kind, given as ratios rather than fixed quantities, suit a household that weighed its fruit as it came in from the garden and scaled the syrup to match.