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Currant Raisin Jam
Wash, drain, seed, and chop two pounds Muscatel raisins and place in preserving kettle. Meanwhile have ready, washed and stemmed, sufficient white currants to make three quarts of juice when mashed and strained. Add to this three pounds of sugar and stir the sweetened juice into the raisins. Mix well and let slowly come to a boil, skimming and stirring till it is thick and smooth. Let cool; place in jars and seal.
A high-pectin jam that needs no added setting agent — the currants supply plenty. The two things the original leaves vague are how much fruit you need and how the jars are closed.
- Three quarts of juiceThat is 12 cups, and it takes a great deal of fruit: figure roughly 10 to 12 lb of stemmed currants, mashed and strained. Weigh before you commit to the raisins, or scale the whole recipe down proportionally.
- White currantsThe pale variety of Ribes rubrum, milder and less sharp than red, and rare in shops now. Red currants work and give a livelier flavor and a darker jam; the set will be the same.
- Muscatel raisinsLarge seeded raisins dried from Muscat grapes, once sold with the pips in — hence the instruction to seed them. Modern raisins are seedless, so wash, drain and chop and skip the seeding. Muscat raisins are still sold and are worth seeking for their perfume.
- Sugar is low by preserving standardsThree pounds of sugar to three quarts of juice plus two pounds of raisins is well under the usual one-to-one jam ratio. It will still thicken, because currants are among the most pectin-rich fruits there are, but the finished jam keeps less well than a full-sugar preserve and should be treated as a short-keeping one.
- "Thick and smooth"Cook uncovered at a full rolling boil, stirring often — the raisins sink and scorch. Test on a chilled plate: the jam should wrinkle when pushed, or read about 220F on a thermometer at sea level.
- SkimmingThe foam is trapped air and fruit protein, not spoilage. Skim it for a clear jam, or stir in a small knob of butter at the end and most of it will disperse.
- Filling the jarsIgnore "let cool": jam should go into clean hot jars while still hot, leaving a quarter inch of headspace, then be processed in a boiling-water bath for 10 minutes. Sealing of this period often meant wax, a tin lid, or a rubber-ringed glass top set over cooled jam, which leaves the surface open to mold.
- YieldNot given. Expect a large batch, on the order of fourteen to eighteen half-pint jars, depending on how far you reduce it.
White currants were a standard fixture of American and British kitchen gardens through the nineteenth century, valued precisely for what this recipe exploits: an enormous quantity of tart, pectin-heavy juice from a bush that needed little attention. Adding raisins to a currant preserve brings sweetness and body without more sugar, which mattered in a household weighing sugar by the pound. Muscatel raisins, dried from Muscat grapes and long associated with the Spanish trade out of Malaga, arrived still holding their seeds, and picking those seeds out was routine tedious kitchen work of the period, often said to have been handed to children. Books of this kind, organized fruit by fruit, were aimed at cooks with more produce than storage.<\/p>