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Spiced Currants
4 quarts currants
1 teaspoon allspice
2 pounds white sugar
1 teaspoon cloves
1 pint vinegar
2 teaspoons cinnamon
Stem the fruit, and wash it. Make the sirup of the sugar, vinegar and spices and boil for five minutes. Add the fruit and cook until the mixture is thick and clear. Seal in clean, hot jars.
A straightforward sweet-sour fruit relish of the sort once put up by the dozen jars to serve alongside roast and cold meats. The only real decisions are the vinegar you use and how you finish the jars.
- Quantities in weightFour quarts of stemmed currants is roughly 4 1/2 to 5 1/2 pounds, or about 2 to 2.5 kg. Two pounds of sugar is a little over 4 1/2 cups; a pint of vinegar is 2 cups.
- Vinegar strengthUse a vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity, which is standard now. Cider vinegar suits the spices better than distilled white, and it was the likelier choice in a 1911 household.
- SpicesGround allspice, cloves and cinnamon are meant here. The five-minute boil starts the extraction, though the spices go on cooking with the fruit afterwards; measure level and do not increase the cloves.
- The endpointCurrants are rich in pectin, so the mixture thickens quickly. The recipe gives no temperature: "thick and clear" is judged by eye, roughly when a spoonful sheets rather than runs, near the usual jelly point on a thermometer. Carried further it turns stiff and dulls the fruit flavour.
- StemmingThe tedious part. Freezing the clusters solid first lets the berries come off the strigs with a fork or between the tines of a comb far faster than picking them by hand.
- Sealing"Seal in clean, hot jars" is open-kettle canning, which current practice has abandoned even for high-acid preserves. Fill hot half-pint jars to 1/4 inch of the rim and process 10 minutes in a boiling-water bath, or skip processing and keep the jars in the refrigerator, where they will hold for months.
- YieldHard to pin down; likely somewhere in the region of 7 to 10 half-pint jars, depending how far the mixture is cooked down. Serve a spoonful with pork, ham, cold lamb, game or a sharp cheese.
- Finding currantsFresh red currants appear briefly in midsummer at farmers' markets and pick-your-own farms; black currants make a much stronger, more resinous relish. Frozen currants work and need no stemming.
Spiced fruit belongs to the long American tradition of "sweet pickles", sugar, vinegar and warm spices to cut the fat of roast and cold meats, at a time when a relish shelf did the work now done by mustard and chutney. Currants suited the method well: tart, high in pectin, and hardy in northern gardens, where a few bushes produced far more fruit than any family could eat fresh. Their disappearance from American cooking is not only a matter of taste. Ribes species host white pine blister rust, and in the early twentieth century federal and state programs restricted or banned their cultivation to protect the timber industry, which is why a fruit that Butterick's readers took for granted in 1911 became difficult to buy for generations afterward.