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Currants, Iced (for Dessert)
INGREDIENTS. pint of water, the whites of 2 eggs, currants, pounded sugar.
Select very fine bunches of red or white currants, and well beat the whites of the eggs. Mix these with the water; then take the currants, a bunch at a time, and dip them in; let them drain for a minute or two, and roll them in very fine-pounded sugar. Lay them to dry on paper, when the sugar will crystallize round each currant, and have a very pretty effect. All fresh fruit may be prepared in the same manner; and a mixture of various fruits iced in this manner, and arranged on ane dish, looks very well for a summer dessert.
TIME.- day to dry the fruit.
SEASONABLE in summer.
A Victorian dessert garnish — fruit frosted in crystallised sugar — that depends on raw egg white left to air-dry for a day at room temperature. That is the part that no longer passes.
- Why the cautionThe egg white is never heated at any stage, and the coated fruit is left to dry for a full day at room temperature. Raw shell egg can carry Salmonella, and air-drying does not make it safe. Use a current recipe for frosted fruit if you want the effect.
- Pounded sugarRoughly caster sugar in modern terms: sugar pounded in a mortar until fine, at a time when household sugar often arrived as a loaf to be broken down at home. Granulated sugar is coarser and less likely to give a smooth frost.
- Iced, not frozen"Iced" here means glazed or frosted in the confectioner's sense, the same usage as icing on a cake. Nothing is chilled and nothing is frozen.
- The pint of waterAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, about 570 ml, not the US 16 oz. Two whites diluted into that much water gives a very thin wash rather than a thick coating.
- Draining mattersThe instruction to let each bunch drain for a minute or two before sugaring is the hinge of the technique. Fruit that goes straight from the liquid into the sugar carries too much moisture and the sugar dissolves into a syrup instead of setting as crystals.
- CurrantsRed and white currants, not the dried Zante currants sold under the same name in baking aisles. Fresh currants come to market for a short summer window and are still usually sold on the strig, which is why bunches can be dipped whole.
- Yield and useNo quantity of fruit is given; the ingredient list simply says 'currants'. This is decoration rather than a dish.
Frosted fruit belongs to the Victorian dessert service, the final course that was as much table architecture as eating — pyramids of fruit, spun sugar, dishes arranged for symmetry and gloss down the centre of the cloth. The recipe sits in the Beeton tradition — the Book of Household Management and later abridgements such as All About Cookery — offering a middle-class household a confectioner's effect without a confectioner: two eggs, water and fine sugar in place of sugar-boiling. Red and white currants were commonly grown in English kitchen gardens, ripening in high summer, which suits the terse "seasonable in summer".