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Raspberry and Currant Jam
1 pound red raspberries ¼ cup currant-juice ¾ pound sugar Mash the fruit, add the currant-juice, and bring to the boilingcook point, stirring well from the bottom. Add the sugar and seal until thick, stirring occasionally. Pack in clean hot jars and .
A small-batch jam that leans on currant juice for its set rather than added pectin. The proportions are given by weight, which is the easiest part to follow exactly.
- The hinge: currant juice is the pectinThe hinge: currant juice helps the set -- Raspberries are comparatively low in pectin, so the quarter cup of currant juice is largely doing the setting work, though it contributes flavour and acid as well. Use juice pressed from fresh or frozen red currants, not a sweetened cordial or jelly.
- Weights, not cupsOne pound of raspberries is roughly 3½ cups whole berries; ¾ pound of sugar is about 1⅔ cups. The 3:4 sugar-to-fruit ratio is lower than most jam recipes, which gives a fresher taste but a softer, shorter-keeping set.
- Order of workMash and heat the fruit with the currant juice, bring it to the boiling point as the recipe directs, then add the sugar and stir until dissolved before cooking on to the setting point.
- How to judge "thick"The original gives no time. Boil hard, stirring from the bottom, until the jam sheets from a spoon or a thermometer reads 220F (about 8F above the boiling point of water at sea level); a spoonful chilled on a cold saucer should wrinkle when pushed. Expect roughly 10 to 20 minutes of hard boiling for this quantity.
- Sealing"Pack in clean hot jars and seal" describes open-kettle canning, which is no longer considered a reliable seal. Either process filled half-pint jars in a boiling-water bath for 10 minutes, or treat it as a refrigerator jam and use it within about three weeks.
- SeedsNothing here strains the fruit, so this is a seedy jam in the older style. Pressing half the mashed raspberries through a fine sieve before cooking keeps the colour and body while cutting the seed load.
- YieldRoughly 1½ to 2 cups, about two half-pint jars. The recipe scales, though much larger batches take longer to reach setting point and lose brightness.
Raspberries and red currants ripen together in northern gardens, and pairing them is an old piece of kitchen arithmetic rather than a matter of taste alone: currants are among the most pectin-rich and acidic of the soft fruits, and raspberries are among the lowest in pectin, so a splash of currant juice turns a syrupy raspberry sauce into a jam that stands up on bread. Before commercial pectin was widely sold in American groceries in the 1910s and 1920s, this borrowing of one fruit's setting power for another was one common method, and preserving chapters of the period are full of such combinations. Butterick, better known for dress patterns, published household books like this one for the same readership as its magazines.