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Raspberry and Currant Preserve
6 lbs. currants 6 lbs. sugar 8 quarts raspberries Pick over, wash, and drain currants. Put into a preserving kettle, adding a few at a time, and mash. Cook one hour, strain through double thickness of cheese-cloth. Return to kettle, add sugar, heat to boiling-point, and cook slowly twenty minutes. Add one quart raspberries when syrup again reaches boiling-point, skim out raspberries, put in jar, and repeat until raspberries are used. Fill jars to overflowing with syrup, and screw on tops.
A two-stage preserve: currants are cooked down to a strained juice, sweetened into syrup, then used to poach whole raspberries a quart at a time so the berries stay intact. The batch is large by modern standards and can be scaled down proportionally.
- The hinge is poaching in batchesAdding all eight quarts of raspberries at once would collapse them into jam and drop the syrup temperature. Cooking one quart at a time, lifting each out as soon as it is heated through, is what keeps whole berries suspended in clear syrup.
- Scale it downSix pounds of currants and eight quarts of raspberries is roughly twelve to fifteen pints of finished preserve. A quarter batch (1 1/2 lb currants, 1 1/2 lb sugar, 2 quarts raspberries) fits an ordinary stockpot.
- Preserving kettleA wide, unlined copper or heavy stainless pan. Do not use aluminium or bare cast iron with this much fruit acid. Width matters more than depth: a shallow pan drives off water faster and sets the syrup sooner.
- Mashing the currants"Adding a few at a time, and mash" means crushing each handful against the bottom of the pan to release juice before the next goes in, rather than tipping in the whole six pounds at once.
- StrainingAn hour of cooking then a double layer of cheesecloth gives juice, not jelly. Let it drip rather than squeezing if you want a clear syrup; squeezing forces through pulp that will cloud the jars.
- SealingFilling to overflowing and screwing on lids relies on the hot syrup alone, as was usual in period preserving instructions. Current practice is to leave 1/4 inch headspace and process filled jars in a boiling-water bath, 10 minutes for half-pints and pints, adjusting for altitude.
- Fruit choiceRed currants are most likely intended; their pectin and acid are what thicken the syrup, so blackcurrants or a substituted juice will behave differently. Frozen currants should work as well as fresh, since they are being cooked and strained anyway.
Currants and raspberries ripen together in northern gardens, and the pairing is old and practical: raspberries are low in pectin and fall apart when boiled, while red currants are among the most pectin-rich fruits grown, so currant juice supplies the set that the raspberry cannot. Cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries routinely used one fruit as the setting agent for another; commercial pectin did not come into general household use until the 1910s and after. Lifting berries out of the syrup and boiling the syrup separately was a common way of producing what was called a preserve as distinct from a jam, and it was valued precisely because the fruit stayed recognisable.