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Raspberry Paste
Mash a quart of raspberries, strain one half of the fruit, and put the juice to the other half; boil them a quarter of an hour, put to them a pint of red currant juice, and let them boil all together till the raspberries are done enough. Then put a pound and a half of double refined sugar into a clean pan with as much water as will dissolve it; boil it to a sugar again; then put in the raspberries and juice, scald the fruit, and pour them into glasses. Put them into a stove to dry, and turn them when necessary.
This is a confectioner's fruit paste — what a French kitchen would call a pâte de fruit — dried slowly in a warm cupboard rather than set in a jar. The hinge is the sugar: boiled to the high "sugar again" stage, it carries enough concentration to dry the fruit into a firm sliceable paste.
- "Boil it to a sugar again"This is the hinge of the recipe. The syrup is taken past the thread stage and on toward the point where it will grain, or crystallise, again. The recipe gives no temperature and period sugar-heights translate only roughly to a thermometer, but it is a high boil: underboil it and the paste never firms up, however long it dries.
- A quart of raspberriesFruit was measured by volume; a quart of raspberries weighs roughly 1¼ lb, and rather more if an imperial quart is meant. Frozen raspberries work, and in fact break down faster.
- Double refined sugarWell-clarified white sugar, among the finest grades then sold. Ordinary granulated is its equivalent; a pound and a half is about 3⅓ cups.
- Red currant juiceNot only a flavouring: red currants are among the more pectin-rich fruits, where raspberries are comparatively low, so the currant juice helps the paste set. A pint is 2 cups (an imperial pint, 2½). If you cannot get currants, use another high-pectin juice or add commercial pectin rather than simply leaving it out.
- "Put them into glasses"Shallow glass dishes or small moulds, filled thinly. The paste is dried in the vessel, then turned out; it is not sealed like a jam.
- "A stove"In confectionery of this period a stove is a warm drying closet, not a cooking range — the equivalent is an oven at its lowest setting, around 120-150F with the door ajar, or a dehydrator. Turning the pieces exposes the underside once the top has skinned over.
- TimingThe quarter-hour boil is for the fruit only. Drying takes far longer than the recipe implies — expect 12 to 24 hours depending on thickness, until the paste is firm and no longer tacky.
- Yield and keepingRoughly 1½ to 2 lb of finished paste. Cut it into squares, roll in caster sugar, and store between layers of parchment in a tin; the high sugar content keeps it for months in a cool, dry place.
Fruit pastes of this kind descend from the medieval and Tudor confectioner's repertoire, from quiddany — properly a clear quince jelly or syrup — and from "marmalade," a word that at the time (from marmelo, quince) meant a stiff, sliceable, cut-and-eaten fruit paste rather than the spreadable preserve we now mean. Before jars and sealed lids, drying was the way to keep fruit: a paste concentrated with sugar and dried in the confectioner's stove needed no airtight vessel at all. The pairing of raspberry with red currant is practical as well as traditional: the currant supplies the pectin and acid that raspberry lacks, a piece of kitchen knowledge that long predates any chemical explanation of why it works.