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Raspberry and Currant Jam
Allow three-quarters of a pound of sugar to each pound of fruit, and one pound of currant juice to every four pounds of fruit.
Mash the fruit, add the currant juice and boil thirty minutes, stirring the fruit well up from the bottom; then add the sugar and cook twenty minutes, stirring constantly.
A two-fruit jam that relies on currant juice for the pectin and acid raspberries lack. The proportions are sound; the timings belong to an era of slow coal ranges and need watching on a modern burner.
- The hinge: cook to set, not to the clockFifty minutes of total boiling in a wide modern pan will take the jam well past setting and into caramel. Work to 220F on a candy thermometer, or to the wrinkle test on a chilled saucer, and ignore the stated times once the mixture sheets from the spoon.
- Currant juice by weight"One pound of currant juice" is a weight, not a volume: a shade under two cups. Press and strain the juice from ripe currants; currants are rich in pectin and acid, which is the whole reason the juice is here.
- Why the sugar is lightThree-quarters of a pound of sugar per pound of fruit is a lower ratio than most modern jam recipes, which run close to one to one. It gives a fruitier, softer set and a shorter shelf life. The currant acid is what keeps it from going syrupy.
- Pan choiceUse a wide, heavy preserving pan rather than a tall stockpot. Depth slows evaporation and forces you to boil longer, which dulls the raspberry flavour.
- Stirring and scorching"Stirring the fruit well up from the bottom" is not decorative. Raspberry seeds and pulp settle and catch; once the sugar is in, the mixture scorches quickly if it is left alone.
- Skim the foamRaspberries throw a heavy pink scum. Skim it off before jarring or the finished jars will look cloudy; a small knob of butter stirred in at the end knocks most of it down.
- Sealing, which the book omitsButterick assumes you know the rest. Fill sterilised jars to a quarter-inch headspace and process in a boiling water bath according to current guidance for your jar size and altitude; paraffin seals, usual in this period, and inverted jars are no longer considered reliable.
- YieldFour pounds of raspberries with two cups of currant juice and three pounds of sugar gives roughly seven to eight half-pint jars, depending on how far you reduce it.
Raspberry and currant were paired long before anyone talked about pectin, and the reason usually given is that cooks noticed that raspberry jam alone often refused to set while currants always did. Commercial pectin began to be sold in the mid-1910s but is generally thought not to have become a household staple in American kitchens until nearer 1920, so a book like The Butterick Cook Book (1911) still solves the problem the old way, by borrowing acid and gel from a second fruit that ripens in the same weeks of early summer. Red currants were a common dooryard bush in the northern states at the time, though white pine blister rust quarantines beginning in the 1910s and 1920s drove them out of American gardens for most of a century, which is why the fruit now reads as exotic and the pairing as unfamiliar. That the recipe gives no jar or sealing instructions is typical of the section: the individual entries record only proportions.