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Currant Lozenges, Black
Put three quarts of ripe black currants, perfectly free from dust, into a preserving-pan, and let them simmer gently until the juice flows freely, assisting its flow by bruising the fruit with a wooden spoon. Squeeze the fruit through a sieve, and press it to obtain as much juice as possible. Return the juice to the pan, with a quarter of a pound of brown sugar to every pint of juice. Let it boil for three-quarters of an hour, and a few minutes before taking it off, add half an ounce of dissolved isinglass for every quart of juice. Pour the paste rather thinly over plates, and put it before the fire for three days to dry. Put the cakes into a tin box with a little white paper between each, and cut them into lozenges, as required. Probable cost of currants, 4d. per quart.
A boiled fruit paste set with fish glue and dried into throat pastilles — closer to a Victorian cough drop than a sweet. The whole thing hangs on getting the paste genuinely dry before it goes into the tin.
- The hinge: dry it properlyPoured thin and left in front of an open fire, the paste dried in warm moving air for three days. A modern equivalent is an oven at its lowest setting with the door cracked — many ovens will not go below about 170F — or a dehydrator at around 135F, until the sheet is leathery and no longer tacky in the centre. Paste that is still damp inside is liable to mould in the box.
- IsinglassIsinglass is a gelatin extracted from the swim bladders of sturgeon and other fish, sold in sheets or shreds and dissolved in a little hot water before use. Powdered gelatin is the practical substitute: half an ounce of isinglass is roughly two of the 1/4 oz envelopes by weight per quart of juice, though the two do not set identically. Add it at the very end, as the original directs — a few minutes before the pan comes off the heat — since prolonged boiling weakens the set.
- Quantities and yieldThree quarts of black currants is about 4 to 4 1/2 lb of fruit; the juice yield will vary with how hard you press, so measure it and add a quarter pound of brown sugar for every pint you actually have. Poured thin over dinner plates, the batch makes several dozen small lozenges depending on how you cut them.
- Sugar is low by preserve standardsA quarter pound of sugar per pint of juice — around 4 oz per 20 oz — is far below jam proportions, and the forty-five minute boil is doing the concentrating. Expect a tart, dark, faintly medicinal sweet rather than a candy, and keep the finished lozenges in a truly airtight tin in a cool place. Refrigerate if the kitchen is humid.
- Preserving-panA wide, shallow pan, usually brass or copper in this period. Use the widest heavy stainless or enamelled pan you have; surface area is what lets the juice reduce in forty-five minutes without scorching. Avoid bare aluminium, which reacts with the fruit acid.
- StrainingA fine sieve pressed hard gives a cloudier, thicker juice than a jelly bag, which is what you want here — some pulp helps the paste body. Do not put the fruit through a blender or grind the seeds, which can add an unwanted bitter note.
- Cost noteThe "4d. per quart" is late-Victorian retail pricing for garden fruit in season and has no modern equivalent. Black currants are hard to buy fresh in the United States; frozen ones, thawed with their juice, work for this.
Fruit pastes dried into lozenges sat on the border between confectionery and the medicine cupboard. Black currant was a common flavour for anything meant to soothe a sore throat — the fruit is markedly high in acid and in what we now call vitamin C, and blackcurrant throat sweets and cordials are still sold on that reputation in Britain. Isinglass, the setting agent here, was the household gelatin of the period, imported in shreds and used for jellies, blancmanges and for clearing beer and wine before commercially packaged gelatin displaced it. Black currants themselves largely vanished from American kitchens in the early twentieth century when states banned Ribes cultivation as a host of white pine blister rust, a restriction generally credited with the fruit's long absence from the United States; it has never lost its place in British cooking.