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Currant and Raspberry Preserve
4 pounds currants 4 pounds sugar 4 pounds raspberries Remove stems from currants, mash, cook thirty minutes, and strain in jelly bag. Cook sugar and juice ten minutes, add raspberries, bring to the boiling point, fill jars first with berries, then with juice, and seal.
A two-fruit preserve of the open-kettle era: currants are reduced to juice and turned into a syrup, and the raspberries are barely cooked so they stay whole. The short cooking of the berries is the whole point of the method.
- The hinge: do not cook the raspberriesThe raspberries go into hot syrup and come only to the boiling point. Any real simmering collapses them and you end up with jam rather than whole berries suspended in jelly.
- Which currantsRed currants are almost certainly what is meant, though the recipe does not say. They are among the highest-pectin, highest-acid fruits in the kitchen, which is why the recipe needs no added pectin and no lemon: the currant juice sets the raspberries, which have little pectin of their own.
- Sourcing currantsFresh currants are seasonal and regional in North America, and in some states Ribes cultivation is still restricted. Frozen currants work for the juice stage since they are strained anyway.
- The jelly bagA doubled square of muslin, cheesecloth or a nylon straining bag over a bowl. Squeezing gives more juice and a cloudier preserve; for a bright, clear syrup let it drip. Four pounds of currants yields roughly 3 to 4 cups of juice.
- "Cook sugar and juice ten minutes"This is a syrup stage, not a set test. Ten minutes of boiling concentrates the sugar and juice, and the berries added afterwards thin it again. Expect a soft set rather than a firm jelly.
- Filling the jarsBerries first, then juice, is deliberate: the fruit packs down and the syrup fills the gaps. Work quickly while everything is hot so the syrup runs into the spaces rather than setting on top.
- Sealing"Seal" in 1907 meant hot syrup into a hot jar, lid on, and often a paraffin cap on jelly. Open-kettle sealing is no longer accepted practice for shelf storage; use a current tested boiling-water-bath process, or treat the jars as refrigerator preserves and use them within a few weeks.
- YieldTwelve pounds of fruit and sugar, less what stays in the jelly bag, gives several pints; the exact figure depends on how much juice the currants give up and how tightly the berries pack.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate maker, and like most manufacturer-sponsored books of the period it carries a full general household repertoire alongside the chocolate recipes that paid for it. A preserving chapter was obligatory: in 1907 a summer glut of soft fruit still had to be dealt with at home, and currants, ripening early and setting reliably, were the backbone of the section. Pairing them with raspberries is an old economy of the fruit garden, the currant supplying the pectin and acid the raspberry lacks, and the technique here, whole berries suspended in a currant jelly, is a cousin of the celebrated Bar-le-Duc currant preserves of Lorraine. Within a few years the currant itself became scarce in America: Ribes bushes host white pine blister rust, and federal and state restrictions on their cultivation from around 1911 pushed a fruit that had been a fixture of nineteenth-century preserving out of ordinary gardens for generations.