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Spiced Currants
4 quarts currants 2 pounds white sugar 1 pint vinegar 1 teaspoon allspice 1 teaspoon cloves 2 teaspoons cinnamon Stem the fruit, and wash it. Make the sirup of the sugar, vinegar and spices and boil for five minutes. Add the fruit and cook until the mixture is thick and clear. Seal in clean, hot jars.
A sweet-sour spiced fruit relish of the kind served alongside cold meat or game. The measures are straightforward once converted, and the only real decision is how you seal the jars.
- What 4 quarts of currants weighsCurrants were sold and measured by dry quart. Four dry quarts of stemmed currants come to somewhere in the region of five to six pounds, depending on how tightly they are packed. Red currants are most likely what is meant here; black currants are far more assertive and would overwhelm the spice.
- Sugar and vinegarTwo pounds of granulated sugar is about 4 1/2 cups. A pint of vinegar is 2 cups; cider vinegar suits the fruit better than distilled white, and either should be 5 percent acidity.
- Ground spice clouds the syrupA teaspoon each of allspice and cloves with two of cinnamon, stirred in loose, will leave the finished relish gritty and muddy. Use whole spices of equivalent weight tied in muslin and lift the bag out before jarring, unless you want the opaque, speckled look of the original.
- Cooking to "thick and clear"This is the hinge. Currants are very high in pectin, so the mixture sets fast once the water cooks off; expect 20 to 35 minutes of steady boiling after the fruit goes in. Stop when a spoonful on a chilled plate wrinkles rather than runs, and stir often near the end because the sugar catches easily.
- Sealing"Seal in clean, hot jars" is the open-kettle method, which is no longer the recommendation. Ladle into hot sterilized half-pint or pint jars, leave 1/4 inch headspace, and process in a boiling-water bath for 10 minutes, adjusting for altitude. The mixture is high-acid, so a water bath is sufficient.
- YieldThe original gives no yield; a batch this size will fill several pints, depending on how far you reduce it. Serve as a condiment with ham, roast pork, duck or cold lamb rather than as a breakfast preserve.
Currants were a fixture of American kitchen gardens for generations, valued because they crop heavily, ripen early, and are so rich in acid and pectin that they set into jelly or a thick relish with almost no coaxing. Spiced fruit of this type -- fruit cooked down with sugar, vinegar and warm spices -- belongs to a large family of nineteenth-century sweet pickles that also took in peaches, pears, plums and crabapples, all intended as a sharp foil to plain roast and boiled meats at a time when the table expected something acid alongside them. That currants appear at all in a book of this vintage is worth noting: Ribes bushes were the alternate host of white pine blister rust, and federal and state restrictions on growing them, begun in the 1910s, gradually pushed the fruit out of American gardens and off American menus over the following decades. Recipes like this one are a trace of a berry that used to be commonplace and then largely was not.