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Currant and Raspberry Jelly
Allow two pounds of currants to one pound of raspberries, one pint of water and one and one-half pounds of sugar. Stem and clean the fruit. Add the water to the fruit and cook. Put into a jelly-bag, made of two thicknesses of cheese-cloth, and let drain over night. In the morning, measure juice and add an equal quantity of sugar. There should be one and one-half pints from the quantity given. Boil rapidly until the fruit will jell when tried in a spoon or on a dish.
A two-day, no-added-pectin jelly that works because red currants are among the most pectin- and acid-rich fruits in the kitchen. The raspberries are there for flavor and color; the currants do the setting.
- The two sugar figures conflictThe sugar is given twice -- The opening list calls for one and one-half pounds of sugar, while the method tells you to measure the drained juice and add an equal quantity of sugar. The two are not far apart: 1.5 pints of juice takes about 1.5 pints of sugar, roughly 1 lb 5 oz. Follow the method and treat the first figure as a shopping estimate.
- Weights and volumesTwo pounds of currants is roughly 8 cups stemmed; one pound of raspberries about 3.5 cups. A pint is 2 cups. "Measure juice and add an equal quantity of sugar" most likely means measure for measure, cup of sugar to cup of juice, rather than weight to weight, though the text does not say so outright.
- Do not squeeze the bagThe overnight drip is the whole point of the doubled cheesecloth. Pressing or wringing forces pulp and fine sediment through and gives cloudy jelly. If your yield falls short, accept it rather than squeezing.
- Cook the fruit gently, boil the juice hardThe first cooking only needs 8-10 minutes with a little crushing, until the currants have burst and given up their juice; long boiling here dulls the raspberry flavor. The second boil, after sugar, should be fast and hard in a wide shallow pan so water leaves quickly.
- Judging the set"When the fruit will jell when tried in a spoon or on a dish" is the sheet test: lift the spoon, and when the last drops slide together and fall in a single curtain rather than separate drips, it is done. A thermometer reading of 220F at sea level, or 8F above the boiling point of water where you are, gives the same answer. Expect 8-12 minutes of hard boiling.
- No commercial pectin, and no long boil eitherRed currants supply their own pectin and acid, so nothing needs adding. Overshooting the set point is the usual failure with this style of jelly; it gives a stiff, caramel-tinged preserve rather than a bright one.
- YieldAbout 1.5 pints of juice plus its sugar gives roughly 3 to 4 half-pint jars.
- Sealing, which the recipe omitsEstes assumes the paraffin-and-tumbler method of his day. Current practice is to ladle the hot jelly into hot sterilized half-pint jars, leave a quarter-inch headspace, and process 5 to 10 minutes in a boiling water bath; skip the paraffin seal entirely. Unprocessed jelly should be treated as refrigerator jelly and used within a month.
Good Things to Eat (1911) was written by Rufus Estes, who was born enslaved in Tennessee in 1857 and went on to cook for the Pullman Company's private railcars and later for the subsidiaries of U.S. Steel in Chicago -- one of the earliest cookbooks published by an African American chef under his own name. Its canning and preserving chapter reflects a period when a professional cook and a household still shared the same summer problem: red currants and raspberries ripen within weeks of each other, both fall apart quickly, and jelly was the way to hold them. The pairing is a practical one rather than a regional tradition: currants carry enough pectin and acid to set a jelly reliably on their own but taste sharp and rather thin, while raspberries have the perfume and the color and almost no setting power. Currant jelly was a staple of nineteenth-century American and British larders, served as much with meat and game as with bread, and it declined in the twentieth century partly because Ribes plantings were restricted in much of the United States as a host of white pine blister rust.