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Raspberries and Currants
5 quarts raspberries 5 cups sugar 3 pints currants Heat, crush and press the currants through a sieve as directed in the recipe for raspberries; add the sugar and when the syrup begins to boil add the raspberries. Proceed as with raspberries.
A two-fruit preserve in which the currants do the structural work and the raspberries supply the flavour. The instructions lean on a companion raspberry recipe that is not on this page, so a few of the steps have to be reconstructed.
- The hinge: currant purée firstThe currants are heated until they burst, crushed, and pushed through a sieve so the seeds and skins stay behind. That strained purée is the pectin and acid engine of the preserve; the raspberries go in whole and late so they keep some shape.
- Quantities in weight5 quarts of raspberries is roughly 6 to 7 lb; 3 pints of currants is somewhere between 2 and 2 1/2 lb before sieving, yielding perhaps 3 cups of purée. The 5 cups of sugar is about 2 1/4 lb.
- This is a low-sugar preserveModern jam recipes run close to equal weights of fruit and sugar. At somewhere between a quarter and a third of that, the set will be soft and the colour will darken faster in storage. Currant pectin will still gel it, but expect a spoonable conserve rather than a firm jam.
- Judging donenessThe original assumes you know when to stop. Cook to 220F at sea level, or until a spoonful chilled on a cold saucer wrinkles when pushed. Subtract about 1F for every 500 feet of elevation.
- SealingBooks of this period often sealed jars straight from the kettle, sometimes inverting them; this page gives no sealing instruction at all. Current practice is to fill hot sterilised jars to 1/4 inch headspace and process in a boiling-water bath, 10 minutes for half-pints and pints, adjusted for altitude. With sugar this low, refrigeration after opening matters more than usual.
- Sourcing currantsFresh red currants are seasonal and scarce in North American markets; frozen work perfectly well here since the fruit is cooked and sieved anyway. Do not substitute dried Zante currants, which are grapes.
- YieldExpect roughly 5 to 6 pints of finished preserve, depending on how far the syrup is reduced.
Raspberry and currant were paired for a practical reason long before anyone measured pectin: red currants are among the most pectin-rich and acidic fruits in the northern garden, and raspberries, fragrant but slack, will not set reliably on their own. Combining them let a cook make a keeping preserve without commercial pectin, which only became a household product in the years around the First World War. The pairing also reflects what an American or British kitchen garden actually produced in high summer, both fruits ripening within weeks of each other. Currants themselves later became a rarity in the United States: cultivation of Ribes species was restricted in the early twentieth century because they host white pine blister rust, and the federal ban stood for decades, which is a large part of why a fruit this common in a period cookbook is hard to find at a modern market. Restrictions have since been lifted in most states, though some still regulate planting.