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Currant Water
Stir one tablespoon of currant jelly into one glass of water. Sweeten slightly, if desired. When currant juice is obtainable, use three tablespoons of the juice and add enough water to dilute to the desired acidity. Acid drinks are most refreshing in fever.
A sickroom drink rather than a cooked dish, and the whole of it hinges on getting the jelly to dissolve. Cold water will leave you with a lump of jelly and a glass of faintly pink liquid.
- Dissolve the jelly firstWork the tablespoon of jelly into a splash of hot water until it is liquid, then top up with cold water or ice water. Red currant jelly is firmly pectin-set and disperses slowly and unevenly in a cold glass, though the original simply says to stir it in.
- What "one glass" meansRoughly 8 fl oz in period usage. The proportions are elastic by design: the recipe tells you to dilute to the acidity the patient likes, so taste as you go.
- The right currantsThis means fresh red currants (Ribes) or jelly made from them, not the dried Zante currants sold in the baking aisle, which are small raisins. Substituting dried currants gives a sweet, flat drink with none of the acidity that is the point.
- If you have no currant jellyAnother sharp, unspiced jelly such as crabapple or quince will dissolve in the same way, though the flavour will differ. A jelly free of seeds and pulp will give a cleaner drink.
- Fresh juice versionThree tablespoons of raw currant juice is tart. Strain it through muslin if you have crushed the fruit yourself, and add water until the acidity suits, as the recipe directs.
- Serve cold and serve at onceChill the water rather than adding ice to the glass, which dilutes the drink as it melts. Mix each glass as it is wanted.
- On the medical claimAn acid drink is genuinely more palatable to someone feverish, which is the real virtue here -- it encourages drinking. It is not a treatment, and it supplies almost no salts; modern advice on fluid replacement for illness should be followed.
- YieldOne glass, for one person.
The Butterick Cook Book (1911) includes recipes for the sick, a standard feature of household manuals in an era when a long convalescence at home was ordinary and nursing fell to the women of the house. Currant water belongs to a very old family of sickroom drinks -- barley water, toast water, apple water, whey -- thin, clear, easily swallowed preparations meant to tempt a patient who would eat nothing. Red currants were a common kitchen-garden fruit in Britain and the northern United States, and because their high pectin and acid content made them set reliably, they were often put up as jelly, which is why jelly, and not the fresh fruit, opens the recipe. The idea that acids are cooling in fever is much older than this book and traces to humoral medicine rather than to any modern physiology; its practical value, then as now, is that a tart drink is easier to keep sipping than a bland one. Fresh currants later became scarce in much of the United States, as many states restricted Ribes planting in the twentieth century because the bushes host white pine blister rust -- part of why a fruit once taken for granted in American recipe books can be hard to find today.