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Currant Cup
Cook into syrup a pint each of sugar and water. When cool pour it over stemmed currants and set on ice four hours. Serve in sherbet glasses.
A two-ingredient syrup poured over raw berries and chilled — the whole thing succeeds or fails on the quality of the currants and the length of the chill.
- The missing quantityThe recipe gives a pint each of sugar and water but never says how many currants. The syrup this makes will cover something on the order of a couple of pounds of stemmed currants; use less syrup if you want the berries barely coated rather than swimming.
- Syrup ratioA pint of sugar is about 14 oz by weight, so this is close to a 1:1 syrup by volume. Bring it just to a boil, stir until clear, and stop — cooking it down further will make it cloying and thick once cold.
- Cool before pouringThis is the hinge. Hot syrup over raw currants collapses the skins and turns the dish to jam-coloured mush. Let the syrup come to room temperature, or chill it, before it touches the fruit.
- Which currantRed currants are the likely intention, though the recipe does not specify: tart, translucent, sold on the strig in high summer. Black currants are far more assertive and would overwhelm the syrup. Frozen red currants work, but thaw and drain them first or the melting ice will thin the syrup.
- StemmingRun a fork down the strig to strip the berries off, or freeze the clusters briefly and rub them free. Pick out any that have split.
- "Set on ice four hours"An ice chest, not a freezer. Four hours in the refrigerator is right: the syrup draws juice out of the fruit and the two meet in the middle.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; how many sherbet glasses it fills depends entirely on how much fruit you use. Spoon the fruit in and top with its own syrup.
A "cup" in Victorian and Edwardian usage meant something served cold in a glass, usually sweetened and often alcoholic — claret cup, cider cup, champagne cup — and the word carried over to fruit desserts of exactly this kind, where the fruit is simply macerated and served in stemware rather than baked or moulded. Red currants were a fixture of English and American kitchen gardens well before they were a market fruit, since they ripen in a short midsummer window and travel badly, which is why so many old books treat them as something to be dealt with quickly: jelly, bar-le-duc, or a chilled cup like this one. In the United States their availability was cut short in the early twentieth century, when state bans on Ribes plantings were introduced because the bushes host white pine blister rust; the restrictions were relaxed in many states only in recent decades, and currants have never fully returned to American markets.