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Spiced Currants
5 pounds currants 4 pounds brown sugar 2 tablespoons cinnamon 2 tablespoons cloves 1 pint vinegar Wash the currants and remove the stems. Place them with the other ingredients in a preserving kettle and boil gently for two hours. This makes five pint cans.
A spiced fruit relish rather than a jam — vinegar and whole-spice quantities put it alongside the pickled peaches and spiced plums that sat beside cold roast meat. Two points need attention before you start: the boiling time and the fact that no processing is specified.
- Cut the boiling timeTwo hours of gentle boiling on a modern burner will reduce this to a dark, sticky paste and risk scorching the sugar. Currants are high in pectin and acid; 30 to 45 minutes of active boiling is usually enough to reach a thick, spoonable set.
- Filling the jarsThe recipe stops at "five pint cans" and specifies no processing at all; open-kettle filling was common in household books of this period. Current guidance is to ladle the hot preserve into clean hot jars, leave 1/4 inch headspace, and process in a boiling water bath — 10 to 15 minutes for pints — then check the seals. The product is high-acid, so a water bath is appropriate; nothing here calls for a pressure canner.
- Which currantRed currants were the more commonly grown of the two in American gardens of this period and give a bright, tart result. Black currants work but are far more assertive and will fight the cloves. Dried "currants" (small raisins) are a different thing entirely and will not do.
- The spice loadThe recipe does not say whether the spices are ground or whole. Two tablespoons each in five pounds of fruit is heavy by current taste, and if ground it will leave the mixture gritty and muddy-looking. Tying the spices in a cheesecloth bag, or using whole cloves and cinnamon sticks and fishing them out at the end, gives a cleaner preserve; halving the quantity is defensible.
- VinegarCider vinegar at 5 percent acidity is the sensible reading of "1 pint vinegar." Older household vinegar varied in strength, so taste as it cooks. Do not substitute a low-acid specialty vinegar if you intend to can the result.
- Weights in cupsFour pounds of brown sugar is roughly 9 cups packed; five pounds of stemmed currants is somewhere around 17 to 20 cups, depending how they settle. Use a wide, heavy, non-reactive pot — the "preserving kettle" — since the vinegar will react with bare aluminum or unlined copper.
- Yield and servingThe recipe's five pints is the yield after the full two-hour boil; stopping earlier will leave you with somewhat more, and looser. Serve a few spoonfuls with ham, cold lamb, game or a sharp cheese rather than on toast.
Spiced fruit in vinegar and sugar was one of the workhorses of the American preserving cupboard, and books of this era carry whole runs of them — spiced grapes, spiced plums, spiced gooseberries — all built on the same frame of fruit, brown sugar, cider vinegar and a great deal of clove and cinnamon. Their job was to supply acid and sweetness at a table dominated by plain roasted and boiled meats, a role now filled by chutney and cranberry sauce. Currants make particular sense in a loose-leaf book of household recipes: the bushes were common in northern gardens, they fruit heavily in a short window, and the berries are too tart for most people to eat out of hand, so nearly all of the crop was cooked into jelly, shrub or a spiced relish like this one. Within a few decades of this book's publication currants had largely vanished from American cooking, generally attributed to state bans on Ribes plantings enacted to protect white pine from blister rust — which is why a recipe calling casually for five pounds of them now reads as a period document.