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Raspberry and Currant Jelly
Follow the recipe for Currant Jelly, using half raspberries and half currants.
A one-line cross-reference that assumes you have the currant jelly recipe in front of you. The substance of it is the fruit ratio, and that ratio exists for a chemical reason worth knowing.
- Why half and halfCurrants are among the highest-pectin, highest-acid fruits in the kitchen; raspberries are much lower in pectin and set poorly and unreliably on their own. The currants do most of the setting work, so shifting the proportion toward raspberries in the hope of more flavour risks a loose jelly.
- Currants means the small tart berriesRed currants, Ribes, not the dried Zante currants sold in the baking aisle. Black currants will also set but dominate the raspberry entirely. Frozen currants work as well as fresh and release juice more readily.
- Sugar, if the base recipe is vagueStandard practice for currant jelly of this era is a cup of sugar to a cup of strained juice, measured after straining rather than before. Slightly less sugar gives a softer, brighter jelly but a shorter shelf life once opened.
- Do not squeeze the bagLet the cooked fruit drip through the jelly bag or several layers of cheesecloth unaided, even if it takes hours. Pressing forces pulp and raspberry seed sediment through and the jelly turns cloudy, which no later straining will fix.
- Judging the setWhere the old books say "until it sheets from the spoon," a thermometer is faster: 220F at sea level, or 8F above the boiling point of water where you are. Overshooting by even a few degrees gives a stiff, gummy jelly.
- SealingPeriod instructions often stop at paraffin poured over the top, which is no longer recommended because it cracks and admits mould. Fill sterilised half-pint jars, leaving a quarter inch of headspace, and process in a boiling water bath according to current guidance for jellies.
- YieldThe recipe as printed gives no clue, and juice yield varies widely with the fruit and how long it drips, so scale by juice volume rather than by fruit weight.
Currant jelly was the workhorse preserve of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American pantry: it set reliably without commercial pectin, which is why cookbooks of this period give it as a base recipe and then hang variations off it, exactly as Mrs. Fryer does here. Pairing it with raspberries is one of those variations, and the logic is practical as much as culinary, since the raspberry supplies perfume and the currant supplies the set. The loose-leaf format of this book makes the cross-reference natural. It is worth noting that red and black currants became scarce in much of the United States in the early twentieth century, when states began restricting Ribes cultivation because the plants host white pine blister rust; a fruit that was ordinary when this recipe was written became, for several generations of American cooks, something they had never tasted.