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Spiced Currants
2 tablespoons cinnamon 2 tablespoons clove 2 pounds brown sugar 1 teaspoon salt 1 cup vinegar Remove stems and wash currants, add remaining ingredients, and boil twenty minutes. Keep in stone jar. 4 pounds peaches 1 cup vinegar 1 tablespoon clove 1 tablespoon cinnamon
This entry has come down to us damaged: the currants themselves never got a weight, and the last four lines belong to a separate spiced peach recipe that has run into the end of this one. What remains cannot be scaled or judged for safety.
- The missing quantityEvery other ingredient is given except the fruit. Without a fruit weight there is no way to know the sugar and vinegar ratio, and so no way to know the finished acidity.
- The peach fragmentThe final four lines -- 4 pounds peaches, 1 cup vinegar, 1 tablespoon clove, 1 tablespoon cinnamon -- come after the instruction to keep the currants in a stone jar and appear to belong to a separate spiced peach recipe rather than to this one. They are reproduced here as printed.
- Storage is the real problem"Keep in stone jar" points to a glazed crock in a cold pantry, relying on sugar and vinegar; the recipe specifies no covering. There is no hot pack, no sealed jar, no processing time and no temperature, so surface yeasts and moulds are a real risk, and mould growth on a preserve raises the pH of the surrounding fruit.
- Twenty minutes of boiling is not processingBoiling the mixture in an open pot cooks the fruit and drives off water, but it does nothing for the empty headspace, the jar, or the seal. Modern practice for a spiced fruit of this kind is a boiling-water bath measured against a tested acid ratio -- neither of which this recipe supplies.
- What the ingredients actually areCurrants here means fresh red or black Ribes, sold by the pound in summer, not the dried Zante grapes sold under the same name in the baking aisle. The vinegar is unspecified as to type and strength -- most likely cider vinegar -- which is another unknown in the acid calculation.
- The spicingTwo tablespoons each of cinnamon and clove is a heavy hand by current standards, and ground clove in that quantity turns bitter and numbing. Period spiced fruits were meant as a sharp relish alongside cold roast meat and ham, not as a sweet spread.
- If you want spiced currantsUse a current tested preserving recipe with a stated fruit weight, a stated acid ratio and a processing time for your altitude.
Lowney's Cook Book was written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate maker, and published in 1907 -- one of the many manufacturer-sponsored cookbooks that carried a full general kitchen course alongside pages promoting the sponsor's product. Its preserving section reflects a New England pantry habit that was already old by then: spiced fruits, put down in vinegar and sugar with clove and cinnamon, served in small dishes beside cold ham, roast pork or boiled beef to cut the fat. Currants grew readily in northern gardens and came in a brief, heavy glut, which is why they turn up preserved in so many forms -- jelly, shrub, bar-le-duc and spiced. The stone jar of the instruction was the standard salt-glazed crock, kept in an unheated cellar; the shift to glass jars with sealing lids was underway in American homes at this date but far from universal, and recipes of the period routinely assume a cold pantry will do the work that processing does now.