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Spiced Currants
Three pounds sugar; five pounds currants; one pint vinegar; tablespoon each cloves, cinnamon, ginger, and allspice, with one teaspoon salt. Simmer carefully three hours, then bottle.
This is a sweet-sour spiced conserve of the sort kept for cold meats, not a jam for toast. The recipe assumes a large open kettle and an unhurried afternoon.
- Which currantsFresh red currants (Ribes rubrum), stemmed, not the dried Zante "currants" sold in boxes. Five pounds is roughly four quarts of fruit; white currants work and black currants give a much stronger, resinous result.
- The vinegarProbably a plain cider or white wine vinegar; a modern 5 percent acidity vinegar is a reasonable stand-in. Do not substitute a low-acid or diluted "drinking" vinegar; the sharpness is what balances three pounds of sugar.
- Spice quantitiesA tablespoon each of four spices is generous but correct for this weight of fruit. Ground spices will cloud the syrup and thicken it; whole cloves, cinnamon stick, bruised ginger and allspice berries tied in muslin give a clearer preserve and can be lifted out at the end.
- Three hours means low heatCurrants are pectin-rich and the mixture stiffens as it reduces, so it scorches easily in the last hour. Use the widest heavy pan you have, keep the heat at a bare simmer, and stir down to the bottom every few minutes once it darkens and mounds on the spoon.
- SkimmingSkim the foam that rises in the first twenty minutes. Left in, it sets as a grey scum at the top of the jars.
- "Then bottle"This would have meant hot syrup into hot jars, sealed and set in the cellar. The sugar and vinegar make it a hostile medium, but for keeping at room temperature follow current home-canning guidance for a water-bath process; otherwise jar it, cool, and keep it in the refrigerator, where it will hold for months.
- Yield and useExpect about four to five pints after three hours of reduction. Serve it in small spoonfuls with cold ham, roast pork, game, duck or a firm cheese; the flavour improves after a month.
Spiced fruit of this kind — fruit, sugar, vinegar and the four warm spices — belongs to the nineteenth-century American and English tradition of "sweet pickles," a bridge between preserve and condiment that filled the relish dishes on a Victorian table alongside cold roasts. Currants were among the most reliable garden fruits in the northern states and in Britain: hardy, heavy-cropping, high in acid and pectin, and too tart for most people to eat out of hand, which made them natural candidates for jelly, shrub, wine and preserves like this one. Their near-disappearance from American kitchens came later, when states began restricting Ribes planting in the early twentieth century because the genus hosts white pine blister rust — one reason a recipe calling casually for five pounds of fresh currants reads as exotic now and would have read as thrifty then.