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Currant Bar-Le-Duc
Red or white currants Sugar Secure the largest sized currants, red or white, and stem them without breaking. To each pound allow three pounds of sugar. Take some currants and bruise them while warm until a pint of juice is obtained. Put half a cupful of this into an earthenware dish and add the sugar. Bring slowly to boiling point and skim carefully.
After it has been boiling for five minutes drop in one pound of the currants and simmer for four minutes. Lift them out without breaking them, and boil the syrup down for five minutes, or longer if it is not very thick. Skim well and strain over the fruit. Put into little jelly glasses and when cold cover with hot paraffin.
A whole-fruit currant preserve in the Bar-le-Duc manner, where the point is that the berries stay intact and suspended in a heavy syrup. Everything in the method serves that end.
- The hinge: barely cook the fruitFour minutes at a bare simmer is all the currants get, and the syrup is thickened separately afterward. Boil them with the syrup and the skins burst, and you have jelly with debris in it rather than whole berries in glass-clear syrup.
- ProportionsThree pounds of sugar to one pound of fruit is correct for this style, not a misprint. It is a very sweet, very dense preserve meant to be spooned onto cheese or toast in small amounts.
- That half cupful of juiceHalf a cup of juice to three pounds of sugar gives almost no liquid to work with, and it will scorch if the heat is high or the pan thin. Keep the flame low until the sugar has fully dissolved; a little more of the reserved juice is reasonable insurance.
- "Bruise them while warm"The recipe does not say how the fruit is warmed, only that it should be warm when crushed; gentle warmth helps the juice run. Straining the juice through muslin before use will keep the syrup clearer.
- Earthenware dishA glazed earthenware pot used on the stove, best over a heat diffuser. Any heavy pan will serve; a nonreactive one is safest with acid fruit.
- Jelly glasses and paraffin"little jelly glasses" are the small tumblers of the period, of no fixed size. Sealing with melted paraffin is no longer recommended by food-safety authorities: the wax shrinks and cracks, admitting mould. Treat this as a refrigerator preserve, or follow current water-bath canning directions for jams if you want it shelf-stable.
- StemmingSnip stems with small scissors rather than pulling; pulling tears the skin at the crown and the berry collapses in the syrup.
Bar-le-Duc, in Lorraine, has been known for its confiture de groseilles épépinées — currant jam made from berries seeded one at a time by hand, traditionally with a sharpened goose quill — since at least the late Middle Ages; the town's confiture is often said to have been sent as a diplomatic gift and was certainly a luxury export by the nineteenth century. What made the genuine article remarkable was that each translucent berry kept its shape after the seeds were removed, so the jam looked like whole fruit floating in syrup. English and American cookbooks around 1900 borrowed the name for any whole-currant preserve in heavy syrup, quietly dropping the seeding, and that is what appears here.