Home › Canning And Preserving › Spiced Currants
Spiced Currants
7 lbs. currants 5 lbs. brown sugar 3 tablespoons cinnamon 3 tablespoons clove 1 pint vinegar Pick over currants, wash, drain, and remove stems. Put in a preserving kettle, add sugar, vinegar, and spices tied in a piece of muslin. Heat to boiling-point, and cook slowly one and one-half hours. Store in a stone jar and keep in a cool place. Spiced currants are a delicious accompaniment to cold meat.
A large-batch sweet-sour fruit relish of the kind that once sat on the sideboard beside cold roast meat. Nothing here is difficult, but two things need translating: which currants are meant, and how the finished jars should be kept.
- The currants are fresh, not driedThese are fresh red currants (Ribes rubrum), sold by the quart in summer, not the dried Zante currants used in baking. Seven pounds is roughly five to six quarts of fruit.
- YieldExpect about six to seven pints of finished relish. Halving or quartering the recipe works without adjustment beyond a shorter cooking time.
- Ambiguous spice measureThree tablespoons each of cinnamon and clove tied in muslin implies whole or broken spice, since ground spice would simply wash through the cloth and cloud the syrup. Whole cloves and cracked cinnamon bark in the bag give the cleaner result the method intends.
- Preserving kettleAny wide, heavy, non-reactive pan: stainless steel or enamelled cast iron. Vinegar and fruit acid will strip bare aluminium and unlined copper and pick up a metallic taste.
- Vinegar strengthThe recipe does not say what vinegar to use. A modern cider or white vinegar at 5 percent acidity is a sound choice. Avoid a low-acid or diluted "salad" vinegar, since the acid is doing preservation work alongside the sugar.
- The cooking time is not a misprintAn hour and a half at a bare simmer is what reduces this to a thick, dark, spoonable preserve. Stir often toward the end; the sugar concentration is high and the bottom scorches quickly.
- Storage is the part to updateA stone crock in a cool cellar was the 1890s answer and depends on a cold larder and steady use. Ladle it hot into sterilised half-pint jars and either process in a boiling-water bath according to a current guide, or skip processing and keep the jars in the refrigerator, where they will hold for several months.
- ServingA tablespoon or two alongside cold ham, tongue, roast pork or sharp cheese. It is a condiment, not a jam, and is too sour-spiced for toast.
Spiced fruit — currants, grapes, plums, peaches — cooked down with sugar, vinegar and clove was a fixture of the American preserving shelf through the nineteenth century, the domestic descendant of the sweet-sour sauces that had accompanied roast meat in English kitchens for centuries. Fannie Farmer's canning chapter reflects a household still expected to put up the summer garden in bulk, and red currants were a standard New England dooryard fruit, tart enough to need heavy sugaring and productive enough to yield seven pounds at a picking. Currants are noticeably less common in American gardens now: beginning around 1911, states began restricting Ribes planting because the bushes host white pine blister rust, and although many of those bans have since been lifted, the fruit never fully returned to ordinary markets. The line about cold meat is the whole point of the recipe — this is Sunday's roast being made to stretch into Monday and Tuesday.