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Currant Jam, Black
Take equal weights of pounded lump sugar and picked fruit. Put the fruit in the preserving-pan, and pour into it two table-spoonfuls of water for every pound of fruit; boil and skim. When the fruit has boiled for twenty minutes, add the sugar. Stir the fruit well to keep it from burning, and boil it half an hour longer, counting from the time when it simmers equally all over. Put a spoonful of the juice and fruit to cool upon a plate. If the juice runs off, the jam must be boiled longer, if it jellies it is done enough. The jam will not keep unless the fruit was gathered when dry. Probable cost, 8d. per pound. Sufficient, a pound of fruit with sugar for a pound of jam. (See also the close of the recipe CURRANT JELLY, BLACK.)
A straightforward equal-weights preserve that needs almost no translation, though the boiling times reflect an era before anyone measured a setting point.
- Lump sugarLoaf or lump sugar was refined sugar sold in cones or cut blocks, hence "pounded" — crushed in a mortar. Ordinary granulated sugar is the same thing already broken up; use it weight for weight.
- Equal weights1 lb fruit to 1 lb sugar is one common ratio for blackcurrant jam, though recipes that add more water often call for more sugar. Blackcurrants are among the highest-pectin and highest-acid fruits in the garden, so no lemon juice or added pectin is needed.
- The water mattersTwo tablespoons per pound is very little, but blackcurrant skins are tough and need softening before sugar goes in — sugar added too early sets the skins hard and no amount of boiling will soften them afterwards. The twenty-minute pre-boil is the hinge of the recipe; do not shorten it.
- Cut the second boilHalf an hour after the sugar is added will give you a dark, slightly caramelised, very stiff jam. With this much pectin the set will usually arrive well before that at a hard rolling boil. Start testing early.
- The plate test, with a numberThe cooled-spoonful test described here is sound. If you prefer a thermometer, a set corresponds to 220F (104C) at sea level.
- SealingThe recipe gives no potting instructions. Use hot sterilised jars and two-piece lids, filled to within a quarter inch of the rim, and either water-bath the sealed jars for 10 minutes or refrigerate them once opened.
- Dry fruitThe instruction to gather in dry weather is about surface mould and dilution rather than superstition. Rinsed currants should be spread out and dried before weighing.
- Yield and costThe book gives a pound of fruit with its pound of sugar as sufficient for a pound of jam, which is roughly a pint by volume, or a jar or two. "8d. per pound" is eightpence in pre-decimal currency.
Blackcurrants (Ribes nigrum) were a kitchen-garden staple in Britain long before they were a commercial crop, valued as much for the medicinal reputation of their syrups and lozenges against sore throats as for jam — a use generally traced to the fruit's unusually high vitamin C content, though that explanation came only after vitamins were identified in the twentieth century. Cassell's gives the jam and the jelly as a pair, cross-referring the one to the other: the jelly used the strained juice and the jam the whole fruit, so a household working through a heavy bush made both from the same picking. The fruit never took hold in America to the same degree; blackcurrant plantings were restricted in several US states in the early 1900s because Ribes species host white pine blister rust, which is why a preserve this ordinary in an English book can seem obscure to a reader in the States.