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Currant Jelly
Wash and drain currants thoroughly. Do not remove stems. Mash a few in the bottom of the kettle. Cook until the juice seems to be extracted from the currants, and the currants look white. Press through a coarse colander, then drip through a jelly bag, but do not squeeze.
Allow one pound sugar for each pint of juice. Boil juice twenty minutes. Add hot sugar and boil hard three minutes; skim when necessary. Strain into hot glasses; let stand till stiff. Cover.
A pre-commercial-pectin jelly that relies entirely on the natural pectin and acid in red currants. Most of the recipe still works; the parts that need translating are the vessels, the sugar, and the way the finished jars are sealed.
- Do not squeeze the bagThis is the hinge. Pressing the pulp forces fine sediment through and the jelly sets cloudy. Hang the bag and let it drip, ideally for several hours or overnight.
- Slightly underripe fruitPectin and acid are both highest just before full ripeness. A batch of dead-ripe currants may never set firm. Leaving the stems on, as directed, does no harm.
- The kettleA wide, heavy, non-reactive pan — stainless or enamelled. Unlined aluminium reacts with the fruit acid. Width matters more than depth, since evaporation is what concentrates the sugar.
- One pound sugar to one pint juiceAbout 2 1/4 cups granulated sugar to 2 cups juice, by American measure. The proportion is close to equal weights and should not be reduced; the set depends on it.
- "Hot sugar"Sugar warmed gently in a low oven in a metal pan. Adding it hot keeps the boil from stalling, which shortens the time on the heat and preserves colour.
- Judge the set, not the clockTwenty minutes of boiling the juice plus three minutes hard after the sugar is a fair guide, but stove output varies. Test at 220F on a thermometer, or when the jelly sheets off a cold spoon in two drops that run together.
- "Hot glasses" and coveringJars sterilised and kept hot so they do not crack on filling. The recipe does not say what the cover was; a poured paraffin seal was the usual method of the period, and it is no longer recommended — it shrinks and lets mould in. Use two-piece canning lids and process the filled jars in a boiling water bath for 5 to 10 minutes, or refrigerate and eat within a month.
- YieldRoughly 4 lb of currants gives about 2 pints of juice, which makes four to five 8-oz glasses.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and published in 1907 for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer — a house cookbook that ranged well beyond confectionery into the full domestic repertoire, preserving included. Red currant jelly held a fixed place on the American and English table as the accompaniment to roast lamb, venison and other game, and as the glaze and filling of choice in pastry work; its reliability came from the fruit itself, which is unusually high in both pectin and acid and so sets without any added agent. Commercial pectins were not yet available to the home cook when this book appeared, which is why the method here is the older one of long open boiling to concentrate what the fruit already contains. Currants themselves became scarce in much of the United States not long after this book appeared, when federal and state campaigns against white pine blister rust — a disease that spends part of its life cycle on Ribes — led to bans on growing them; the fruit has only returned to American gardens in recent decades as those restrictions were relaxed.