Home › The Principles of Cookery › Black Currant Jam
Black Currant Jam
The fruit should be gathered on a fine day, and should be ripe, and well freed from the stalks and tops. Put three quarters of a pound of sugar to one pound of fruit. Place sugar and fruit in a preserving-pan, and allow it to stand near or by the side of the fire until the sugar has dissolved, then stir it, and bring it to the boil. It must be well skimmed, and will require greater attention on this head if brown sugar be used instead of loaf. Simmer till it stiffens, and put into pots for use. Probable cost, 8d. per ordinary jam pot. (See also CURRANT JAM, BLACK.)
A short recipe that assumes you know what jam should look like when it is done. Blackcurrants are high in both pectin and acid, so this sets readily; the risks are tough skins and scorching, not failure to gel.
- The hinge: soften the skins firstBlackcurrant skins are thick and will stay leathery in the finished jam if sugar hits them before they have cooked. Modern practice is to simmer the fruit in a little water (roughly a cup per 2 lb) until the skins are tender, then add the sugar. Cassell's standing-by-the-fire method draws out juice slowly to the same end, but only if you give it real time and low heat.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined white sugar sold in cones and broken up as needed — plain granulated sugar is the equivalent. The warning about skimming reflects the impurities in period brown sugar, which threw far more scum than anything sold today.
- The proportionThree quarters of a pound of sugar to one pound of fruit is below the pound-for-pound proportion often given in Victorian jam recipes, and it works here because blackcurrants are so acid and pectin-rich. It also means a shorter keeping life than a full-sugar preserve; refrigerate after opening and use within a few weeks.
- "Preserving-pan"A wide, heavy pan; stainless steel or enamelled cast iron is the easy modern choice, and unlined copper was the traditional one for short, high-sugar boils. Avoid bare aluminium, which reacts with the fruit acid. Width matters more than depth, since evaporation is what concentrates the jam.
- "Simmer till it stiffens"Setting point is 220F (105C) on a sugar thermometer, usually 8-15 minutes at a full rolling boil after the sugar has dissolved. Failing a thermometer, put a spoonful on a chilled saucer, wait a minute, and push it with a fingertip: it should wrinkle.
- SkimmingSkim once at the end rather than repeatedly; a small knob of butter stirred in off the heat disperses most of the remaining foam. Constant skimming with a modern clean sugar wastes fruit.
- Potting"Put into pots for use" meant hot jars sealed with waxed paper discs. For anything you intend to store at room temperature for months, use sterilised jars with two-piece lids and give the filled jars a 10-minute boiling-water bath; otherwise treat it as a refrigerator jam.
Blackcurrants earned their place in British kitchen books as much for medicine as for pleasure: the fruit was long valued for sore throats, and blackcurrant jam thinned with hot water was a standard domestic gargle and cough drink well into the twentieth century. Cassell's costing of the recipe in pence per jam pot reflects the book's audience of households preserving their own garden fruit. The instruction to gather on a fine day is probably not sentiment hat ddilutes the preserve and, in the days before reliable thermometers, may have made the setting point that much harder to judge. Blackcurrants were later banned from cultivation in much of the United States for decades because the bushes host white pine blister rust, which is why the flavour remains far more familiar in Britain than in America.