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Red Currant Jelly
Select fruit that is full and large and under rather than over-ripe, and remove all dry and withered berries. If the stems seem dusty, wash the fruit well before removing it from the stems and toss it in a cloth to dry as much as possible; then remove the stems and put the currants on the fire to boil, using only a little more than enough water to prevent them burning and crushing some of the fruit to help make a liquid. If the jelly is intended to be used chiefly on the dinner-table with meats, threefourths of a pound of sugar to a pint of juice will produce a more acceptable article than when more sugar is used. Regarding the quantity of currants required, it will be found, if the fruit is very good, that a "box" of fruit will make two half-pint glasses of jelly.
A bare-bones jelly formula that assumes you already know how to hang a jelly bag and test for a set. The two things it does tell you are the two that matter most: use fruit that is slightly underripe, and be sparing with sugar if the jelly is for the meat platter.
- Underripe fruit is the pointCurrants are high in both pectin and acid, and both are at their highest just before full ripeness. Fruit picked a shade early sets firmly without added pectin, which a cook of this period would not have had to hand in any case.
- A "box" of fruitAlmost certainly a market dry basket of the period, and the original does not say what size. The stated yield of two half-pint glasses points to the smaller (dry pint) box, giving roughly a cup of juice; a full quart of fruit would fill several more glasses than the recipe claims.
- Sugar ratioThree-quarters of a pound of sugar to a pint of juice is about 1 3/4 cups sugar per 2 cups juice. Equal weights of sugar and juice was the standard sweet-jelly proportion; the lower figure here gives the tart jelly wanted with lamb, venison and cold beef.
- How much waterThe original gives no measure: only "a little more than enough to prevent them burning," which in practice means a very small quantity in the bottom of the pan. Crushing a handful against the side of the pan starts the juices and prevents scorching before the rest collapses.
- StrainingCook only until the berries have burst and gone pale, roughly 8 to 10 minutes, then drip through a scalded jelly bag or a double thickness of cheesecloth. Squeezing the bag forces pulp through and gives cloudy jelly; the period books took clear jelly as a mark of skill.
- Testing the setBoil juice and sugar hard and take it off at 220F, or 8F above boiling water where you live. Without a thermometer, use the sheeting test: the last drops fall from a cold spoon in a joined sheet rather than singly. Currant jelly usually gets there in under 10 minutes, and overcooking turns it dark and gummy.
- Glasses and sealing"Half-pint glasses" were straight-sided tumblers sealed with a disc of paraffin wax. Current practice is half-pint canning jars with two-piece lids, filled to 1/4 inch of the rim and processed in a boiling water bath; paraffin seals are no longer recommended because mould can grow beneath them.
- YieldAs written, two half-pint jars. The fruit can be multiplied, but sweetened juice should be boiled in small batches rather than one large one: a big pan takes so long to reach temperature that the pectin suffers.
Red currant jelly earned its place in a 1911 general-purpose cook book less as a preserve than as a condiment and a kitchen staple: it went to table with mutton, venison and game, glazed tarts, and stiffened the pan sauces that Victorian and Edwardian cookery leaned on. The distinction the recipe draws between a dinner-table jelly and a sweeter one is a real one of the period, when the same fruit was put up at two different sugar levels for two different uses. Currants suited home jelly-making better than almost anything else because they set reliably without added pectin, which was not sold to households in the United States until the 1910s and 1920s; before that a cook's insurance was underripe fruit and a tart, acid berry. The fruit itself became scarce in much of the United States in the early twentieth century, when states began banning Ribes plantings as hosts of white pine blister rust, and red currants have never fully returned to American markets since.