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Groseilles, Sirop De
Bruise two or three pounds of red currants, and leave them in a jar until the next day. Pour off the juice, and boil it gently, with one pound of pounded loaf sugar to every pint of juice. Skim carefully, and bottle for use. A nice variation is made by putting one part of raspberries to two of red currants. This syrup is useful for flavouring jellies, or, if mixed with water, it makes a refreshing summer beverage. Time to boil the juice, a quarter of an hour. Probable cost of currants, 3d. or 4d. per pound.
A plain fruit syrup with an unusually high sugar ratio, which is what keeps it. The only real decisions are how you extract the juice and how you store the finished bottle.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined white sugar sold in a hard cone and broken up, then pounded to a powder. Ordinary granulated white sugar is the direct replacement, weight for weight.
- The ratio is the preservativeOne pound of sugar to one pint of juice is roughly 450 g to 570 ml, a very heavy syrup. Cutting the sugar back gives a fresher flavour but a syrup that will ferment or mould within days rather than weeks.
- The overnight standBruising the currants and leaving them to stand lets the crushed fruit release its juice so that it can simply be poured off. Keep the jar covered and cool, and do not extend the stand much beyond the overnight the recipe allows, or fermentation will start in earnest.
- Straining"Pour off the juice" leaves a great deal behind. Tip the whole mass into a jelly bag or a double layer of muslin and let it drip without squeezing if you want a clear syrup; pressing gives more juice but a cloudy result.
- A quarter of an hourFifteen minutes at a gentle simmer is enough to dissolve the sugar and drive off a little water. Longer boiling pushes the pectin in the currants toward a set, and you end up with thin jelly rather than pourable syrup.
- SkimmingThe scum is fruit debris and impurities thrown up by the boil, and it clouds the bottle if left. Take it off with a spoon as it rises rather than stirring it back in.
- Bottling and keepingFill clean, hot bottles to the neck and cap at once. The recipe gives no method of sterilising or sealing beyond bottling, so treat it as a refrigerator syrup, keep it there once opened, and discard any bottle that fizzes or grows a film.
- YieldThree pounds of currants yield only the juice that runs freely, so expect around a pint, with the finished syrup coming to rather more than that once the sugar is dissolved. For a drink, one part syrup to five or six parts cold water is about right.
Cassell's indexes a good many preparations under their French names, and this is one: groseille is the red currant, while the gooseberry is distinguished as groseille à maquereau. Currant syrups and cordials were standard summer stores in British and French households through the nineteenth century, made when the bushes came in all at once in July and drawn on for months afterwards to flavour jellies, ices and water. The costing in the entry, three or four pence a pound, is a reminder that currants were then a cheap garden or market fruit rather than a specialty item, and that a book of this kind expected its readers to be putting up fruit in quantity as a matter of course. Syrups like this one work on the principle that enough sugar in solution will hold a fruit's flavour past its season.