Currant Syrup
Mash the currants, put in a covered receptacle, and set in a warm place for four days. Strain through a jelly bag overnight, but do not squeeze. Measure, and to every pint of juice add two pounds of granulated sugar. Stir until the sugar is nearly dissolved, then heat in a double boiler until the syrup is clear. When cool pour into small bottles, dip corks in sealing wax and keep in a dry, cool place. All syrups should be made in a porcelain or granite kettle and stirred with a wooden spoon.
A cold-extraction fruit syrup of the soda-fountain type: juice drawn off slowly, then held with a very high proportion of sugar. The four-day stand is the part that decides whether it works.
- What the four days are forMashed currants left in a warm place will ferment lightly, and that light fermentation is generally what lets the juice run clear and free rather than setting to jelly in the bag. The recipe specifies only 'a warm place' and no temperature. Keep the receptacle covered and stop at four days; left longer, a warm mash is liable to sour or to grow surface mould. Discard the batch if you see fuzzy mould rather than a clean foam.
- Do not squeeze the bagPressing forces pulp and pectin through and gives a cloudy syrup that is hard to clear afterwards. Hang it overnight and take only what drips.
- The sugar ratioTwo pounds of granulated sugar to a pint of juice is about 4.5 cups sugar to 2 cups juice. That is a heavy syrup by design; the sugar, not the heat, is what preserves it. Do not reduce it and expect the keeping quality described.
- Double boiler, not a hard boilHeat only until the syrup turns clear and every grain of sugar has gone. A double boiler cannot take the syrup much above the temperature of the water beneath it, so it stays well short of a boil, which is the point: boiling drives off the fresh currant flavour and can set the residual pectin.
- "Porcelain or granite kettle"Granite ware is speckled enamel over steel. Any enamelled or stainless pan does the job. The instruction exists because bare copper, iron and untreated aluminium react with fruit acid and dull both colour and taste.
- BottlingCorks dipped in sealing wax were the period's closure. Use sterilised bottles with proper caps, and once a bottle is opened keep it in the refrigerator. A wax seal on a cork resists moisture but is not a sterile pack.
- Yield and useRoughly 2 lb of currants gives about a pint of juice, and that pint plus the sugar makes a little over a quart of syrup. The recipe itself says nothing about serving; two tablespoons in a tall glass of cold or soda water is the usual way with a syrup of this kind, and it also does well over ice cream or stirred into iced tea.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the American temperance kitchen -- a genre of books offering fruit syrups, shrubs and phosphates as substitutes for the saloon, and a syrup chapter like this one is essentially a home version of what the drugstore soda fountain kept in pump bottles. Red currants were a standard dooryard fruit in the northern states in the nineteenth century, tart and high in pectin, which is why so much of the method here is aimed at defeating that pectin and getting a clear pourable syrup instead of jelly. Their near-disappearance from American cooking is documented and deliberate: currants and gooseberries host white pine blister rust, and federal and state eradication campaigns beginning in the 1910s tore out the bushes across pine-growing regions, with some state bans lasting into living memory. There is a small irony in the four-day warm ferment that opens the recipe, since the same step, carried further, is the beginning of currant wine.