Home › Canning and Preserving › Currant Jelly
Currant Jelly
Wash and pick the currants, but do not remove the stems. Put them in the preserving kettle, crushing a few in the bottom first; heat slowly, stirring frequently. When the currants are hot, mash them with a potato masher and let them drip the same as the apples for apple jelly. After this put the cloth or bag over another dish and press out as much juice as possible, using this for a second quality of jelly. Return the clear juice to the kettle, adding a pint of granulated sugar to every pint of juice. Stir until the sugar is dissolved; place over the fire; bring to a boil; set aside and skim. Repeat this process three times; test by a few drops on a cool saucer; if it jellies remove from fire and pour it into sterilized glasses.
A no-pectin jelly that works because red currants are among the most pectin- and acid-rich fruits in the kitchen. The instructions assume you have already read the apple jelly entry earlier in the section, and they leave the sealing step to the cook.
- The hinge: do not squeeze the first bagThe clear, sparkling jelly comes only from juice that drips under its own weight. Pressing clouds it, which is why Mrs. Fryer sends the pressed juice to a separate dish for a "second quality" batch.
- Why the stems stay onStemming red currants by hand is slow work, and underripe fruit in the mix carries extra pectin and acid. Wash them, pick out leaves and debris, and leave the strigs; they are strained out with the pulp.
- "Let them drip the same as the apples"That means pouring the mashed hot fruit into a dampened jelly bag or a colander lined with several layers of cheesecloth suspended over a bowl, and leaving it several hours or overnight. Do not stir or poke it.
- Sugar by volume, not weightA pint of granulated sugar to a pint of juice is roughly 14 oz sugar to 1 lb juice, near the 1:1 ratio by weight that modern jelly making still uses. Measure the strained juice before adding anything.
- The three boil-and-skim cyclesRepeated boiling and skimming was one older way of working without a thermometer. Current practice is one hard rolling boil, skimming once at the end, and stopping at 220F (8F above the boiling point of water where you live). Long or repeated boiling darkens the color and can break the pectin down so the jelly never sets.
- The saucer testChill the saucer in the freezer first. Drop on a little jelly, wait 30 seconds, and push it with a fingertip: it should wrinkle and hold a line. Pull the pot off the heat while you test, since jelly can overshoot in under a minute.
- Sealing, which the recipe omits"Sterilized glasses" in this period meant scalded tumblers, commonly topped with melted paraffin. Paraffin seals are no longer considered reliable; use canning jars with two-piece lids and follow a current tested procedure for processing and headspace.
- Yield and sourcingAbout 4 lb of currants gives roughly 4 cups of juice, which yields four to five half-pint jars. Fresh red currants have a short summer season and are banned or restricted in a few areas because of white pine blister rust; frozen currants make excellent jelly and can go into the kettle unthawed.
Currant jelly earned its place at the front of every nineteenth-century preserving chapter because it was the household's all-purpose acid sweet: spread on bread, spooned beside roast mutton and venison, thinned into sauces, and kept in the sickroom as currant jelly water. Red currants are so high in natural pectin and acid that they set reliably with nothing but sugar, which mattered a great deal in a period before bottled pectin was widely sold. Mrs. Fryer's loose-leaf format reflects the same practical spirit: the currant page tells you to drip "the same as the apples," trusting that the apple jelly leaf is close at hand. The fruit itself has since become uncommon in American markets, largely because state bans imposed early in the twentieth century to protect white pine from blister rust drove commercial currant growing nearly out of existence.