Home › Puddings › Currant Preserves
Currant Preserves
3 lbs. currants 3 lbs. sugar 1 1/2 cups water 2 oranges sliced thin, skin and all.
Put in an earthen dish over night, then put over fire in kettle and boil just fifteen minutes after boiling begins.
A plain small-batch preserve that relies on the natural pectin and acidity of fresh currants. Two details need translating before you start: which currants, and what to do with the jars.
- Currants means fresh red currantsCurrants means fresh currants -- These are the tart berries of Ribes, most likely red, not the dried Zante currants sold in the baking aisle. Three pounds is roughly 10-12 cups of stemmed fruit; look for them fresh in July or use frozen.
- The overnight rest is not optionalSugar, fruit and sliced orange sit together in an unglazed or glazed earthenware bowl (any nonreactive bowl does) so the sugar draws juice out of the berries. This dissolves the sugar before heat is applied, which is why the cooking time can be so short.
- Fifteen minutes is a real limitCurrants are among the most pectin-rich fruits in the garden. Timed from the full rolling boil, fifteen minutes is enough to set; pushing further darkens the color and turns the set rubbery. If you want confirmation, the mixture will sheet off a cold spoon or read about 220F.
- The orangesSkin and all means the whole fruit, pith included, sliced paper-thin. Two average oranges add pectin and a faint bitterness that reads as intentional. Remove the seeds, and slice as thinly as you can manage or the peel will still be tough after fifteen minutes.
- KettleHere this means a large open pot, of the kind sold as a preserving kettle. Use the widest heavy-bottomed pan you have, filled no more than a third, and stir often: a sugar-heavy preserve scorches on the bottom long before the surface shows it.
- Sealing, which the recipe omitsBooks of this era commonly directed jars sealed with paraffin wax and stored in a cold cellar. That method is no longer considered sound. Follow current water-bath canning guidance for the jars and headspace, or simply refrigerate the finished preserve and use it within a few weeks.
- YieldExpect roughly ten to twelve half-pint jars (five to six pints), a little less if you cook it hard.
Red currants were a fixture of American kitchen gardens in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, valued precisely because they set into jelly with no help beyond sugar and a short boil, in an era when home cooks are often said to have worked without commercial pectin. The addition of whole sliced oranges is characteristic of the era's preserve recipes, which used citrus for both flavor and extra pectin, and became easier once refrigerated rail shipping made Florida and California fruit available inland year-round. The Gold Medal Flour cook book itself was promotional literature from the Washburn-Crosby milling company of Minneapolis, later part of General Mills. Currant growing in the United States declined sharply in the twentieth century after Ribes plantings were restricted in many states as a host of white pine blister rust, one reason a preserve that was once ordinary now takes some hunting to make.