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Currant and Orange Preserve
One pound of currants Two small oranges One cup of water Three-quarters pound of sugar Grate the rind of the orange, and add it to the currants, sugar and water. Cut the oranges into very small pieces and add. Cook until thick. Put into glasses and seal as jelly is sealed.
A two-fruit preserve of the simplest kind: fruit, sugar, water, boiled down until it sets. The details that matter are what "currants" means and how it is sealed.
- Currants means the fresh berriesFresh red or black currants, not the dried Zante currants of the baking aisle. One pound is roughly 3 1/2 cups of berries, stemmed. Black currants give a darker, more assertive preserve; red gives a brighter, tarter one.
- The whole orange goes inRind is grated in, then the oranges themselves are chopped small and added, pith and all. Use thin-skinned fruit and slice as finely as you can manage; large pieces of pith stay tough and bitter through the cooking. Two small oranges is about 8 oz of fruit.
- Sugar is by weight, and it is lowThree-quarters pound is about 1 3/4 cups. That is a modest ratio for a preserve; many period preserve recipes called for something closer to pound-for-pound, so the result here keeps less well and is best treated as a refrigerator preserve unless properly processed.
- It will set on its ownCurrants are among the highest-pectin fruits there are, and citrus rind and pith add more. No added pectin is wanted. "Cook until thick" means the gel point, 220F at sea level, or until a spoonful chilled on a cold plate wrinkles when pushed.
- Watch for scorching near the endOnly one cup of water for a pound of fruit means the pan goes thick fast. Use a wide heavy pan, stir constantly once it starts to mound on the spoon, and pull it the moment it sets rather than boiling it to caramel.
- "Seal as jelly is sealed" meant paraffin"Seal as jelly is sealed" -- In 1911 that would most often have meant pouring melted paraffin over the surface of an open tumbler, though paper or cloth covers were also still in use; the book does not specify. Paraffin seals are no longer recommended: they crack, admit mould, and are not a hermetic seal. Use sterilised jars with two-piece lids and a boiling-water bath, or simply keep the jars in the refrigerator and eat within a month.
- YieldAbout two to three half-pint jars, depending on how far you reduce it.
Good Things to Eat (1911) was written by Rufus Estes, born enslaved in Tennessee in 1857, who cooked for Pullman private railcars and later for the subsidiary of U.S. Steel in Chicago — one of the earliest cookbooks published by an African American chef, and largely a working professional's notebook rather than a domestic manual. A canning and preserving chapter was standard in books of the period, when a summer's fruit had to be captured in glass or lost, and currant preserves were a fixture of that work: the bushes crop heavily in a short season and the berries are so rich in pectin that they set with nothing but sugar and heat. Pairing them with orange was a way of stretching a tart, one-note fruit with something imported and slightly luxurious, which by the 1910s meant Florida and California citrus arriving by the same railroads Estes cooked on.