Home › The Principles of Cookery › CURRANT JAM, BLACK (superior)
CURRANT JAM, BLACK (superior)
Boil two pounds of black currants until the juice flows freely. Put the fruit through a sieve, leave behind whatever will not pass through. Boil the pulp for five or six minutes, lift it from the fire, and stir into it a pound of powdered loaf sugar. Boil it again until it thickens, and pour it into jars for use. Time to boil the pulp with the sugar, a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, currants, 4d. per quart.
A sieved blackcurrant jam — closer to a thick fruit butter than a conserve, since the seeds and skins are discarded. The main thing to watch is the sugar, which is half what a keeping jam needs.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in a hard cone, broken up and pounded as needed. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct equivalent; "powdered" here means crushed fine, not modern confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch.
- The sugar ratio is lowOne pound of sugar to two pounds of fruit is roughly half the proportion in a standard preserve. The result tastes fresher and more sharply of currant, but sugar is what makes jam shelf-stable. Treat this as a refrigerator jam, keep it no more than a few weeks, and use a current tested recipe and canning process if you want jars for the pantry.
- First boilBlackcurrants are dry-skinned and need help. Add about half a cup of water to the pan before that first boil, or the fruit will scorch before the juice runs.
- SievingA nylon or stainless sieve and a stiff spatula work faster than a wooden spoon. What stays behind is seeds and tough skin; expect to lose a fair proportion of the weight.
- Testing the setA quarter of an hour with the sugar is a fair guide, but judge by the jam, not the clock. Blackcurrants are very high in pectin, so a cold-saucer test or a thermometer reading of 220F (104C) will show a set well before the fruit tastes overcooked.
- YieldTwo pounds of currants and a pound of sugar give roughly two to two and a half cups of finished jam — two half-pint jars with a little over.
- The price note"4d. per quart" is fourpence pre-decimal, and soft fruit was commonly sold by volume rather than weight; how many quarts two pounds came to is only a rough estimate.
Cassell's marks this version "superior," and the likely reason is the sieving: an ordinary blackcurrant jam left the seeds and skins in, and the labour of pushing hot pulp through a hair sieve was the whole difference between a plain kitchen preserve and something fit for a good table. Blackcurrants were a staple of British gardens and cottage plots well before they were fashionable, valued as much for their supposed medicinal virtue in throat complaints and colds as for the flavour y their their genuinely high vitamin C content, which is several times that of an orange by weight. Readers in the United States may find the fruit hard to come by: blackcurrant cultivation was widely restricted there in the early twentieth century because the plant hosts white pine blister rust, and although many states have since relaxed the rules, the berry never regained its place in the American pantry.