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Currant Syrup
Select red, white or black currants taking care that the fruit is fully ripe, and pick over carefully to free from any rotten ones. Mash the currants in an earthenware crock with a vegetable masher and let it stand for twenty-four hours, at a temperature of from 75 to 85 degrees, Fahrenheit. Keep the crock covered with a cloth, stirring the contents once in a while; then press out the juice through a sieve, measure, and leave it for the night. In the morning add one wineglassful of brandy to every pint of juice; allow this to macerate for a few hours and then filter. After filtering put the juice into a sugar boiler, and stir in a pound and a half of crushed loaf sugar for every pint, heat to boiling, skim and stand in clean bottles previously rinsed out with a little brandy. Cork well, and capsule or wax over.
A preserving syrup for the bar and pantry rather than a dessert sauce: the finished liquid is roughly three parts sugar to two parts juice, which is what makes it keep. Two steps do the real work — the deliberate 24-hour ferment and the filtering.
- The 24-hour stand is intentionalLetting the mashed fruit sit warm begins a light fermentation that breaks down pectin and releases far more juice than pressing raw currants ever will. Keep the crock covered with cloth, stir occasionally, and if it smells vinegary or shows mould rather than fruity and slightly yeasty, throw it out and start again.
- 75 to 85FThat is 24 to 29C — warmer than most modern kitchens. An oven with only the light on, or the top of a refrigerator, may serve, but check the temperature with a thermometer rather than assuming.
- WineglassfulIn American cookbooks of this period a wineglass is about 2 fluid ounces, or 1/4 cup. So 1/4 cup brandy per pint of juice.
- Crushed loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in a hard cone and broken up for use; ordinary granulated sugar is the direct substitute. A pound and a half per pint of juice is about 3 1/3 cups sugar to 2 cups juice.
- Sugar boilerA deep, heavy pan, traditionally unlined copper. Any wide stainless pot works; currant juice is acidic enough to attack aluminium and bare cast iron, so avoid both.
- FilteringAfter the brandy has macerated, pass the juice through a coffee filter, jelly bag or several layers of damp muslin, and do not squeeze it. Squeezing pushes fine pulp through and the syrup will be cloudy and throw sediment in the bottle.
- Heat to boiling, then stopBring it just to a boil to dissolve the sugar and clarify, skim the scum, and bottle at once. Prolonged boiling darkens the colour and drives off the fresh currant aroma, which is the whole point of the syrup.
- Capsule or waxCorks were sealed with a metal foil capsule or dipped in wax to stop the cork drying. Screw-top bottles sterilised in boiling water do the same job; fill hot, seal, and cool. Once opened, keep it in the refrigerator.
- Yield and useEach pint of juice gives roughly two pints of finished syrup once the sugar is dissolved. Use it as a soda-fountain and cocktail syrup, an ounce or so per drink, or over ice with sparkling water.
Fruit syrups like this one were bar stock as much as kitchen stock in the Waldorf's day, when a hotel bar kept its own raspberry, currant and orgeat syrups for mixed drinks, sodas and invalid cordials. Black currant syrup has a longer pedigree still as the base of French cassis, traditionally traced to Burgundy, where the same combination of macerated currants, spirit and sugar is made as a liqueur. The instruction to offer red, white or black currants interchangeably is a reminder of how commonplace Ribes was in American markets and gardens around 1900 hem states states began banning currant and gooseberry cultivation to check white pine blister rust, a campaign that got underway in the 1910s, which is one reason a syrup once obvious enough to need no explanation now reads as an exotic.