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Currant Salad
Pick equal weights of white and red currants, strawberries, and cherries, and place them in alternate layers on a high dish. Strew a little white sugar on each layer, and pour over the whole some thick cream, or place little lumps of Devonshire cream at short distances from each other upon the fruit. Time, a quarter of an hour to prepare. Probable cost, 8d. per pound. Sufficient, a half pound of each fruit for a good dish.
A late-Victorian summer fruit dish that depends entirely on the fruit being ripe and the assembly being late. Two pounds of fruit in total makes a generous bowl for six to eight.
- Currants means the fresh berriesWhite and red currants here are the fresh translucent berries on strigs, not the dried vine fruit sold as currants for baking. Strip them from their stems with a fork before weighing.
- Devonshire creamThis is clotted cream, thick enough to hold its shape in spoonfuls. Any decent clotted cream works; mascarpone is the nearest substitute if none is available, though it is markedly less sweet and less cooked-tasting.
- Sugar and timingThe quarter of an hour given is preparation only. Redcurrants are sharply acidic and want the sugar to sit on them for twenty to thirty minutes before serving so it dissolves into juice, but much longer and the strawberries collapse. Assemble no more than an hour ahead.
- How much sugarNo quantity is given. Roughly a tablespoon of caster sugar per layer, about four tablespoons across two pounds of fruit, suits modern palates; adjust upward if the currants are underripe. Caster or icing sugar dissolves faster than granulated.
- CherriesStone them. The recipe gives no instruction either way, but a cherry pitter takes minutes and makes the dish edible with a spoon.
- A high dishA footed compote or glass trifle bowl, chosen so the layers show through the side. The point of the alternating layers is visual, so keep each colour distinct rather than tumbling the fruit together.
- CostEightpence a pound is Cassell's own estimate for the dish as served, fruit, sugar and cream together.
Cassell's places this among the simplest summer dishes: nothing is cooked, and the whole thing rests on the brief midsummer window when red and white currants, strawberries and cherries all crop together in an English garden. Supermarket fruit no longer arrives in a single glut, and fresh currants have largely disappeared from British shops in favour of the frozen and dried. Devonshire cream, the clotted cream of the West Country, is generally said to have been sent by rail to London by the later nineteenth century, and it appears here in a general dictionary of cookery rather than a regional one. The cream may be placed in separate lumps rather than poured, the recipe offering the two treatments as simple alternatives.