Home › Beverages › Black Currant Cup
Black Currant Cup
To one quart of weak green tea add half a pint of black currant juice; sweeten to taste and chill thoroughly before serving.
A two-ingredient cooler that depends entirely on the tea being weak enough to stay in the background. Everything else is adjustment.
- The measuresA quart is 4 cups; half a pint of currant juice is 1 cup. The finished drink is five cups, or four modest glasses over ice.
- "Weak" green teaPerhaps half the leaf you would use for drinking, say a teaspoon per two cups, and a short steep in water below boiling; the recipe itself gives no brewing directions. Strong or over-hot tea tends to turn bitter and astringent as it cools, which may be what the word "weak" is guarding against.
- Sweeten while the tea is warmSugar dissolves much more readily in warm tea than in cold. Add it before chilling, or make a simple syrup and stir it in at the end so you can judge the sweetness against the fruit.
- Sourcing the juiceFresh black currants are scarce in the United States; bottled unsweetened blackcurrant juice or a cassis syrup sold for European markets works. If using a sweetened syrup or cordial, cut the added sugar sharply — those run very sweet.
- If starting from fruitCrush ripe currants, warm them gently with a splash of water to release the juice, then strain through a jelly bag or fine sieve. About 1 lb of currants gives roughly a cup of juice.
- Chilling and iceChill the mixture itself rather than pouring it hot over ice, which dilutes it and dulls the fruit. Cold tea often clouds — a harmless haze generally attributed to tannins binding with caffeine — and brewing a little cooler is said to reduce it.
- ServingA slice of lemon or a sprig of mint suits it, and the cup takes well to sparkling water or dry sparkling wine poured in at the table.
Fruit "cups" — a base of tea, wine or water lengthened with fruit juice and sugar — filled the beverage chapters of American and British household books from roughly the late nineteenth century onward, a vogue often attributed to temperance sentiment, which is said to have made a cold, sweet, non-spirituous drink the expected thing for afternoon calls and church socials. Black currant was a natural choice in the British tradition, where the fruit was long grown for jelly and for cordials taken against sore throats; its sharpness stands up to dilution in a way that sweeter berries do not. Its rarity in American kitchens has a specific cause: black currants host white pine blister rust, and beginning around 1911 federal and state authorities restricted or banned currant cultivation to protect the timber industry, with many state prohibitions lasting into the 1960s and later. A recipe like this one reads differently on either side of that line — an ordinary summer drink before, an exotic one after.