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Red Currant Jam
Wash, stem, and weigh currants, allowing equal weight of sugar, adding it when fruit has been boiling three minutes. When dissolved and at boiling point remove and place in jars.
To make a darker, thicker jam boil sugar and fruit together an hour.
A weight-for-weight preserve of the plainest kind: red currants are so high in both pectin and acid that they need nothing but sugar and a short boil. The two versions given here are genuinely different products, and it is worth deciding which you want before the sugar goes in.
- The hinge: sugar by weight, not volume"Equal weight of sugar" means equal to the weight of the stemmed, washed fruit — 2 lb currants to 2 lb sugar. Weigh the fruit after cleaning, or the ratio drifts and the jam will not keep.
- The three-minute method gives a soft setThe three-minute method gives a softer set -- Boiling the fruit alone for three minutes, then dissolving the sugar and pulling the pan the moment it returns to a boil, tends to give a bright, loose jam. It is excellent and very red, but it may well be spoonable rather than firm.
- An hour is a long time by modern standardsThe "darker, thicker" version is a long-boiled jam: the colour goes from scarlet to garnet and the flavour deepens. Modern practice would reach a firm set in 10-15 minutes of hard boiling at 220F (105C); an hour is for the flavour and colour, not the set.
- How to know it is doneThe book offers no test. Use 220°F (105°C) on a thermometer at sea level, or chill a saucer and check that a spoonful wrinkles when pushed.
- StemmingCurrants come on strigs; strip them with a fork over a bowl. A few stems will not ruin the jam, but they add tannin and are unpleasant to bite.
- Pan and utensilsUse a wide, heavy, non-reactive pan — stainless or enamelled. Currants are acidic enough to pick up a metallic taste from bare aluminium or unlined copper, and a wide pan evaporates faster, which is what thickens jam.
- Filling the jars"Place in jars" is all the book says; in this period that would most likely have meant hot jars sealed with paper and wax and kept in a cool larder. Fill sterilised jars to within 1/4 inch of the top and either process 10 minutes in a boiling-water bath for shelf storage, or cool and keep in the refrigerator and use within a month.
- Yield2 lb currants with 2 lb sugar gives roughly 5 half-pint jars from the short-boiled version, nearer 4 from the hour-long one.
Red currants were a mainstay of northern European and colonial American gardens long before they were a market fruit — hardy, productive, and so tart that sugar was the only sensible destination for most of the crop. Their reputation rests on chemistry: currants carry unusually high levels of both pectin and acid, which is why generations of cookbooks could get away with instructions this bare, and why currant juice was often added to weaker fruits to make them set. The equal-weight rule that governs this recipe is the old preserving arithmetic in its purest form, sugar being the preservative rather than a flavouring. In the United States the fruit later became scarce for reasons that had nothing to do with taste: Ribes species host white pine blister rust, and cultivation was restricted in many states from the early twentieth century onward, with bans only gradually lifted. A recipe that looked utterly ordinary when this book was printed became, for several decades after, difficult for an American cook to make at all.