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Currant Jelly
Currants are in the best condition for making jelly between June twenty-eighth and July third, and should not be picked directly after a rain. Cherry currants make the best jelly. Equal proportions of red and white currants are considered desirable, and make a lighter colored jelly.
Pick over currants, but do not remove stems; wash and drain. Mash a few in the bottom of a preserving kettle, using a wooden potato masher; so continue until berries are used. Cook slowly until currants look white. Strain through a course strainer, then allow juice to drop through a double thickness of cheese-cloth or a jelly bag. Measure, bring to boiling-point, and boil five minutes; add an equal measure of heated sugar, boil three minutes, skim, and pour into glasses. Place in a sunny window, and let stand twentyfour hours. Cover, and keep in a cool, dry place.
Currants are one of the few fruits with enough pectin and acid to jell on their own, so this old open-kettle method still works — but the finishing steps belong to a world of paraffin-sealed tumblers and need updating.
- The hinge: do not squeeze the bagLet the juice drip through the cheesecloth or jelly bag under its own weight, even if it takes hours. Pressing or wringing forces pulp through and gives cloudy jelly that never looks right, however well it sets.
- No water is addedThe instruction to mash the fruit in the bottom of the kettle as you go is the whole technique: crushed currants release enough juice to keep the pan from scorching. Cook over low heat, stirring, until the berries look pale and collapsed — the color has moved into the juice. The recipe gives no time; judge by the look of the fruit.
- "Preserving kettle" and the wooden masherA wide, heavy nonreactive pot: stainless steel or enameled cast iron. Avoid bare aluminum or unlined copper, which react with fruit acid. The wooden masher is not sentiment; it will not scratch an enameled pan.
- Heated sugarWarming the sugar in a low oven before adding it keeps the boiling juice from dropping off temperature, so the second boil restarts quickly. Skip it if you like, but expect the three minutes to run longer.
- Judge by temperature, not the clockThree minutes after the sugar goes in is a rough guide only; it depends on your pan and the pectin in that year's fruit. Cook to 220F at sea level, or until a spoonful sheets off the edge in a curtain rather than dropping in beads. Overcooking gives a stiff, caramel-tinged jelly.
- "Glasses" and the sunny windowThese were straight-sided tumblers sealed with melted paraffin, and the day in the sun was thought to help a slow batch finish setting. Neither practice is used now: paraffin seals fail invisibly and let mold in, and standing open jelly in a warm window is an invitation to airborne yeasts.
- Sealing todayLadle the hot jelly into hot half-pint canning jars, leaving a quarter inch of headspace, and process in a boiling-water bath for five minutes. Jelly left unprocessed keeps in the refrigerator for a few weeks.
- YieldThe recipe gives none. Reckon on about a cup of juice per pound of currants, and roughly two half-pints of finished jelly for every two cups of juice — so four pounds of fruit fills about four half-pint jars.
- Sourcing the fruitCherry currants and white currants are heirloom sorts you will find at farmers' markets or on your own bushes rather than in a supermarket. Any red currant works; the window Farmer gives — June twenty-eighth to July third — probably marks the point when the fruit is fully colored but not yet soft, and pectin does fall off as fruit over-ripens.
Farmer's precision about the calendar hird — — reflects a New England kitchen that took delivery of currants from its own garden or a nearby farm, and had learned by experience that fruit ripened past its peak makes a poorer set. Currant jelly was a common sweet preserve of the nineteenth-century American household, partly because it needed nothing but fruit and sugar, and the recipe leans entirely on the fruit's own setting power — commercial bottled pectins did not reach American cooks until the 1910s. It is also a record of a fruit about to become scarce. *Ribes* species host white pine blister rust, and in the decades after this book appeared federal and state programs pushed to eradicate currant and gooseberry bushes to protect the timber industry, with cultivation restricted in many states well into the late twentieth century — one reason currant jelly went from a pantry staple to a specialty item. The day in the sunny window, incidentally, was standard advice in period cookbooks and generally explained as helping an under-set batch firm up; it is best read as a sign of how variable the results were before thermometers were common in home kitchens.