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Currants to Serve Simply Uncooked
Currants may be iced as for frosted grapes and cherries or may be crushed and sweetened a little before serving uncooked.
Two lines that assume you already know the frosted-grape method from elsewhere in the book. Here is what they leave out.
- Which currantThese are fresh Ribes berries — red, white or black — sold on the strig in high summer, not the dried Zante currants of a fruitcake. Nothing in this recipe works with the dried sort.
- Stripping the fruitRun the stems through the tines of a fork to release the berries without bursting them. Pick out any brown or shrivelled ones.
- How much sugar"Sweetened a little" is doing a great deal of work. Red currants are sharply acid — roughly a tablespoon of sugar to each cup of berries is a starting point, and black currants want more. Add it, wait, then taste again.
- Let them standCrushed and sugared currants benefit from standing a while at room temperature so the sugar dissolves and draws out juice. Served at once the sugar may still be undissolved.
- The frosting methodFrosting of this period generally meant brushing the fruit with beaten egg white, rolling it in fine sugar and leaving it to dry to a crust; the book's own frosted grapes and cherries recipe should be checked for its exact directions. Currants are small and shed easily, so frost them in whole sprigs rather than singly. If the frosted fruit is to be eaten rather than used as a garnish, use pasteurized egg white — the coating is never cooked.
- Yield and servingCrushed and sweetened currants make a spoon-over for cream, rice pudding, sponge cake or plain custard. Frosted sprigs are decoration for a dessert plate.
Currants were a fixture of nineteenth-century kitchen gardens on both sides of the Atlantic, valued because they crop heavily, keep on the bush for a week or two, and are high enough in pectin to set a jelly without help. Much of the crop went into jelly and shrub, and a book like this one is quietly arguing the other case: that a berry too sour to eat out of hand is fine once crushed with sugar and given time to make its own syrup. The frosting technique it refers back to — egg white and fine sugar, air-dried — was familiar dessert-table work of the period, when a dish of fruit was expected to look like a centerpiece before it was eaten. American currant growing was curtailed in the early twentieth century by restrictions tied to white pine blister rust, for which currants and gooseberries are an alternate host, which is a large part of why the fresh berry is unfamiliar to many US cooks today.