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Spiced Currants
7 lbs. currants 5 lbs. brown sugar 3 tablespoons cinnamon 3 tablespoons clove 1 pint vinegar Pick over currants, wash, drain, and remove stems. Put in a preserving kettle, add sugar, vinegar, and spices tied in a piece of muslin. Heat to boiling-point, and cook slowly one and one-half hours. Store in a stone jar and keep in a cool place. Spiced currants are a delicious accompaniment to cold meat
A sweet-sour spiced fruit relish rather than a pudding sauce, built on the same sugar-and-vinegar ratio as nineteenth-century spiced plums and grapes. Everything hinges on cooking it slowly enough that the syrup thickens without scorching.
- Currants means fresh currantsThese are fresh red or black currants off the bush, not the dried Zante currants sold in the baking aisle. Seven pounds is a large picking; if you cannot get that quantity, the recipe scales down cleanly at 5 parts fruit to just under 4 parts sugar by weight.
- Preserving kettleA wide, heavy, non-reactive pan — enameled cast iron or stainless. Avoid bare aluminum or copper, since a pint of vinegar simmering for an hour and a half will react with both.
- SpicesThree tablespoons each of cinnamon and clove most likely means ground spice, and ground spice in muslin will leak and cloud the syrup. Use bruised cinnamon sticks and whole cloves in the bag instead, roughly the same volume, and taste before the end — three tablespoons of clove is assertive.
- Heat to boiling-point, then slowlyBring it up once to dissolve the sugar, then hold it at a bare simmer. At a hard boil for ninety minutes the sugar will catch on the bottom and the whole batch turns bitter. Stir up from the base every ten or fifteen minutes.
- Judging donenessAfter about an hour and a half the currants should be dark and slack in a syrup that sheets thickly off a spoon. If it is still watery, keep going; if it has gone stiff early, take it off — it firms further as it cools.
- Storage, updatedA stone jar in a cool place was a cold-cellar instruction. Ladle it hot into sterilized canning jars and process in a boiling-water bath for the time your jar size requires, or simply cool it and keep it refrigerated, where the sugar and vinegar will hold it for several months.
- YieldTwelve pounds of fruit and sugar reduced for ninety minutes gives roughly 6 to 7 pints. Halve or quarter the batch unless you are giving jars away.
- ServingServe cold or barely cool, a spoonful beside cold ham, tongue, roast pork or sharp cheese. It is too sharp to use as a pudding sauce.
Spiced fruits in sugar and vinegar were a common American answer to the problem of cold meat: a hard-cooked relish that supplied the acid and sweetness a plain joint lacked, and that kept in a crock through the winter without refrigeration. Currants suited the treatment particularly well because they carry a great deal of natural pectin and acid, so the syrup sets firmly and the preserve keeps with less fuss than a spiced peach or pear.