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Raspberry and Currant Preserve
6 lbs. currants 8 quarts raspberries 6 lbs. sugar Pick over, wash, and drain currants. Put into a preserving kettle, adding a few at a time, and mash. Cook one hour, strain through double thickness of cheese-cloth. Return to kettle, add sugar, heat to boiling-point, and cook slowly twenty minutes. Add one quart raspberries when syrup again reaches boiling-point, skim out raspberries, put in jar, and repeat until raspberries are used. Fill jars to overflowing with syrup, and screw on tops. 1 peck peaches
A currant-juice syrup used as the poaching medium for whole raspberries, so the berries keep their shape instead of collapsing into jam. Two things need attention: the vague sealing instruction, and the stray line at the end.
- The stray last line"1 peck peaches" belongs to the next recipe in the book and has nothing to do with this one. Ignore it. (For reference, a peck of peaches is roughly 12 lb.)
- Quantities8 quarts of raspberries is by volume, on the order of 10 lb of fruit; 6 lb of currants may yield anywhere from about 1½ to 2 quarts of strained juice. Finished yield will vary a good deal with how loosely the berries are packed.
- Sealing is the weak point"Fill jars to overflowing with syrup, and screw on tops" is open-kettle canning, standard practice when this was written and abandoned since. Modern practice is a boiling-water bath in two-piece lids after filling, and current USDA times for berry preserves should be followed. Without it the jars are refrigerator preserves with a few weeks' life, not shelf-stable.
- No added pectinRed currants are among the highest-pectin fruits there are, which is the whole reason they carry the raspberries here. The hour of cooking plus the twenty-minute boil with sugar sets the syrup on its own.
- StrainingLet the cooked currants drip through the doubled cheesecloth rather than wringing it. Squeezing forces pulp through and clouds the syrup, which defeats the point of the clear jewel-red result.
- Working in batchesAdding one quart of raspberries at a time keeps the syrup at temperature and stops the berries breaking up. Lift them out with a slotted spoon as soon as they are heated through, a minute or two, and pack them loosely so there is room for syrup.
- The preserving kettleA wide, heavy, non-reactive pan. Width matters more than depth for the twenty-minute reduction; a stockpot will take much longer to concentrate.
- Finding currantsFresh red currants are seasonal and scarce in North America, a legacy of the twentieth-century cultivation bans. Frozen currants work perfectly for the juice, since it is strained anyway.
Currant and raspberry ripen together in a northern garden and have been paired in the preserving pan for centuries, the currant supplying the acid and setting power the raspberry lacks. The technique here, using a strained fruit juice as the syrup so whole berries can be poached in it and lifted out intact, is the old "preserve" as distinct from jam: the fruit was meant to keep its shape and be recognizable on the plate. The recipe also catches the red currant at the end of its American career. Ribes species were identified as an alternate host for white pine blister rust, and from around 1911 federal and state programs restricted their cultivation to protect the timber industry; the federal ban was lifted in the mid-twentieth century but several states kept their own, and the fruit never regained its place in the ordinary home garden. Fannie Farmer could assume six pounds of currants were had for the picking in a way no later American cookbook could.