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Compote of Red Currants
Put one pound of ripe red currants into a basin with half a pound of caster-sugar. Press the currants with a wooden spoon, and when the sugar has partly dissolved in the juice, pour the whole into a pan and boil up, and turn into a compote dish when cool. Leave it for two hours, when, if it has been properly prepared, it will set to a jelly and be ready for use.
A two-ingredient preserve that works only because red currants are among the most pectin- and acid-rich fruits in the kitchen. Nothing here is difficult, but the set depends entirely on handling the boil correctly.
- The hinge: a real boil, kept short"Boil up" means bringing the pan to the boil; the recipe gives no duration, and a short boil is the safer reading. Currant pectin sets fast; a long boil drives off water, darkens the colour and gives a stiff, jammy mass rather than the trembling jelly intended.
- Caster-sugarSuperfine sugar, sold as caster or bar sugar. It is specified because it dissolves in the cold juice during the maceration step. Granulated works if you allow longer standing and stir more.
- BasinAn ordinary mixing bowl. Glass or stainless is preferable, as currant juice will react with unlined copper or aluminium and dull in colour.
- Quantities in modern termsOne pound of stemmed red currants is roughly 3 1/2 cups; half a pound of sugar is a scant 1 1/8 cups. The 2:1 fruit-to-sugar ratio is low by preserving standards.
- Strip the stemsThe original assumes it. Run the strigs through the tines of a fork; a few stray stems will not poison the compote but they turn woody and unpleasant in the mouth.
- SkimCurrants throw a heavy pink foam. Lift it off with a spoon as the boil subsides, or the finished dish will look cloudy under its clear surface.
- Cooling and settingLet the pan cool before pouring into the serving dish, as the instruction says, then leave two hours at room temperature. Once set, it goes to the refrigerator and should be eaten within about a week; this is a fresh compote, not a sealed and processed preserve.
- Yield and serviceThe recipe gives no yield; expect roughly two cups. Enough for six as an accompaniment to cold roast game, lamb, or a plain cream or rice pudding.
Red currants were a staple of nineteenth-century European and American gardens and market stalls long before they became scarce in the United States, where cultivation was widely restricted in the early twentieth century because Ribes species host white pine blister rust; bans in some states lasted for decades, which is a large part of why the fruit is unfamiliar to American cooks today. The Waldorf, where Oscar Tschirky presided as ma tre d'h tel, worked in the French idiom, and compote there carries its proper technical sense: fruit cooked in sugar and served in its own syrup, distinct from a jam or a marmalade. That this compote sets to jelly with nothing added is a property of the fruit itself, and cooks of the period relied on currant and apple juice as their pectin source generations before commercial pectin was bottled.