Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Currant Jam
Currant Jam
Put one pound each of black, red and white currants into a preserving-pan and boil for a few minutes; then add two pounds and a quarter of sugar and boil all together, crushing the fruit with a wooden spoon; after boiling gently for half an hour, fill the jars with the jam, cover over and put away for use.
A three-currant jam of the plainest sort: fruit softened first, sugar added second, half an hour of gentle boiling. The proportions are sound, but the sealing instructions belong to an era of paraffin and larder shelves.
- The hinge: cook the fruit before the sugarBoiling the currants briefly on their own bursts the skins and draws out pectin. Adding sugar at the start tends to toughen the skins and can make a clean set harder to reach.
- Preserving-panA wide, shallow, unlined copper or heavy brass pan. Any wide non-reactive pot works; width matters more than material, since evaporation is what concentrates the jam. Fill it no more than a third full, as currant jam climbs alarmingly.
- Currants, not raisinsThese are fresh Ribes berries, not dried Zante currants. Red and white currants are the same species and interchangeable; blackcurrants are a different, stronger fruit and give the jam its dominant flavour. Frozen currants work and in fact release juice more readily.
- Sugar ratioThree pounds of fruit to two and a quarter pounds of sugar is roughly 75 percent by weight, on the low side for a long-keeping preserve. Currants carry enough acid and pectin to set at this ratio, but the jam will keep less well than a one-to-one recipe.
- Half an hour is a guide, not a ruleTest for set rather than trusting the clock: 220F on a thermometer, or a spoonful chilled on a cold saucer that wrinkles when pushed. Wide pans reach set faster than narrow ones.
- Sealing"Cover over and put away" meant a paper or paraffin cap and a cool larder. Current practice is to ladle the jam boiling hot into sterilised jars, seal, and process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes; otherwise treat it as a refrigerator jam and eat it within a month.
- YieldAbout five to six half-pint jars, depending on how far you reduce it.
Currants were a fixture of the American and British kitchen garden well into the twentieth century, valued precisely because they are so rich in pectin and acid that they set almost by themselves — before commercial pectin, currant and apple juice were what cooks reached for to rescue a runny preserve. Blackcurrant cultivation declined in much of the United States after states began banning Ribes plantings as an alternate host of white pine blister rust, a restriction generally traced to the 1910s and 1920s and only relaxed decades later, which is why the fruit is far more familiar to European cooks than American ones today. The recipe is written as a proportion to be scaled, with no fuss about flavourings.