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Currant Sponge
Make the same as Blackberry Sponge, using a half pint of currant juice, a half pint of sugar, a half pint of boiling water, a half box of gelatine, and four eggs.
A gelatine "sponge" is fruit juice and dissolved gelatine whipped with egg to a foam and chilled. The eggs in this one never see heat, which is the problem.
- Why the cautionThe only hot element is the half pint of boiling water used to dissolve the gelatine; by the time the mixture is cool enough to whip, it is well under any temperature that would pasteurise egg. The recipe calls for four eggs and does not say whether whites alone or whole eggs were used; either way they go in uncooked, into a sweet mixture that then stands at room temperature for some time while it sets. Use a current recipe, or pasteurised egg, if you want a chilled fruit sponge.
- "Half a box of gelatine"A box of the period is usually reckoned at about an ounce, so half a box is roughly half an ounce — about two envelopes of modern unflavoured granulated gelatine. Older sheet and shred gelatines varied in strength, so the figure is genuinely approximate rather than a clean conversion.
- Half pintsA half pint is one cup, so the ratio here is one cup each of currant juice, sugar and boiling water. That is a very sweet base by modern taste, deliberately so — currant juice is sharply acidic.
- Currant juiceCurrants here means the fresh bush fruit, most likely red, not the dried Zante "currants" sold in the baking aisle, which are grapes. Fresh currants are seasonal and hard to find in much of North America, where cultivation was restricted for decades because the plants host white pine blister rust; bottled red currant juice or unsweetened juice pressed from frozen fruit is the usual substitute.
- The cross-referenceThe instruction to "make the same as Blackberry Sponge" is typical of the period: a book would give one method and then a run of fruit variants with nothing but the quantities. Without the parent recipe on the page, the order of operations — dissolve, cool to the point of setting, then beat in the egg — has to be inferred.
Gelatine sponges, whips and snows fill the dessert chapters of American summer cookery books from the 1880s onward, and they exist because packaged granulated gelatine had made a set dessert a matter of minutes of work rather than a day spent clarifying calf's-foot stock. Books of this sort suited summer conditions: no oven heat, fruit at its ripest, and a dish that could be made in the cool of the morning and turned out at supper. Red currants were a standard dooryard bush fruit in the northern states and in Britain, prized more for jelly and juice than for eating out of hand, and a household with currant bushes had juice to use in July. The formula's rigid symmetry — a half pint of this, a half pint of that — reflects the volume measuring that was near-universal in American books of the period.