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Currant Water
2 tablespoons currant jelly 1 cup boiling water Mix jelly and water, strain, chill, and serve.
Cranberry, strawberry, raspberry, blackberry and plum water may be prepared in the same way.
A one-cup sickroom drink that takes two minutes. The only real technique is dissolving the jelly completely before it cools.
- The hingeAdd the boiling water to the jelly and stir until no lumps remain, while the water is still near boiling. Currant jelly is heavily pectinated and will not disperse in tepid water; you will be left with jellied threads that the strainer removes along with most of the flavour.
- Which jellyRed currant jelly is meant here, the standard tart pantry jelly of the period. Black currant preserve gives a much heavier, muskier drink; if that is what you have, use a little less.
- StrainingA fine mesh sieve is enough. The point is to catch any undissolved jelly, not to clarify it to a sparkle.
- YieldMakes one cup, one serving. It scales directly: two tablespoons of jelly per cup of water.
- Sweetness and acidCommercial jellies may run sweeter than a home-boiled one. Taste once dissolved and correct with a few drops of lemon juice rather than more jelly.
- ChillingCool to room temperature first, then refrigerate; ice cubes dropped straight in will dilute a drink that is already mostly water. Serve cold in a tumbler.
- The other fruitsCranberry, strawberry, raspberry, blackberry and plum all work, but only if you use a set jelly rather than a whole-fruit jam or preserve. Preserves cloud the water and leave pulp in the sieve.
Fruit waters like this belong to invalid cookery, the branch of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century household writing devoted to feeding the sick. Before the era of routine intravenous fluids, a nurse's job included coaxing liquid into a feverish patient, and cookbooks carried whole chapters of barley water, toast water, beef tea, albumen water and jelly waters of exactly this kind: mild, cold, faintly acid, and easy to swallow. Currant jelly was a natural base, useful both for meat and for the sickroom. Lowney's Cook Book, published by the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company in the early 1900s, was a general household manual as much as a promotional volume, and its inclusion of a recipe this slight shows how firmly such drinks were still considered part of a cook's ordinary duties. The placement under "Chafing Dish Delicacies" is odd, since no chafing dish is involved.