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Currant and Raspberry Jelly
Follow recipe for Currant Jelly, using equal parts of currants and raspberries.
A one-line variation that assumes you have the book's Currant Jelly recipe in front of you: crush the fruit, heat it gently to release juice, strain, then boil the juice and add an equal measure of heated sugar. Everything that matters here is in the ratio and the set.
- Why the currants are not optionalRed currants are among the highest-pectin fruits in the kitchen; raspberries are low in pectin and will not reliably gel on their own. The equal-parts split is what carries the set, and shifting it toward raspberry risks a syrup rather than a jelly.
- "Equal parts" is ambiguousThe original does not say whether the parts are by weight or by measure. The book's jelly instructions generally work by measure, so volume is the likelier reading of the text, though weight is the easier thing to hit consistently; a quart of currants and a quart of raspberries are not the same mass.
- Fruit ripenessUse currants that are just ripe or slightly under. Pectin falls off as fruit softens, and fully ripe raspberries already contribute little. Currant stems need not be picked off before juicing, which saves considerable time.
- No added waterBoth fruits give up plenty of juice when crushed and warmed. Adding water only means boiling it off again, which costs colour and flavour.
- StrainingLet the cooked fruit drip through a jelly bag or several layers of cheesecloth without pressing. Squeezing the bag drives pulp through and produces a cloudy jelly, which is the usual failure with this style of recipe.
- Judging the setThe book directs a long boil of the juice before sugar goes in, then a short one after. Rather than timing it, work to 220F on a thermometer, or use the sheet test: jelly is done when it slides off a cold spoon in a single sheet instead of two drops.
- Heating the sugarThe instruction to warm the sugar before adding it is worth keeping. Cold sugar drops the temperature of the boiling juice and lengthens the cooking, which dulls the fresh raspberry flavour.
- SealingPeriod practice was to pour into glasses and cover with a disc of paraffin wax. That method is no longer recommended, as the wax can crack and admit mould. Use canning jars, either processed in a boiling-water bath or simply refrigerated and eaten within a couple of months.
- YieldYields vary with the fruit, but reckon roughly a cup of juice per pound of mixed fruit, and each cup of juice with its cup of sugar making about a cup of finished jelly. Four pounds of fruit is a sensible working batch.
Currant jelly was the default preserve of the nineteenth-century American pantry: cheap, reliable, and set firm without any purchased pectin, which was not sold commercially until the second decade of the twentieth century. Cooks used it as much as a sauce for mutton, venison and game as a spread for bread, and the Boston Cooking-School book treats it as the parent recipe from which other jellies are derived by substitution, which is exactly what this entry does. Blending in raspberries was a way of borrowing the currant's gelling power for a fruit that has none to spare, a trick still used in mixed-fruit jelly today. The homely tone of the entry belies how thoroughly currants would later disappear from American cooking: cultivated Ribes were the alternate host for white pine blister rust, and a federal eradication campaign begun in the 1910s removed them from much of the country, with the national ban lifted in 1966 but some state restrictions persisting well beyond that. Readers who find currants hard to source are seeing the long shadow of that programme rather than any lack of appetite for the fruit.