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Red and White Currant Jam
Select fruit that has been carefully picked, remove the stalks, weigh, and put into a preserving-pan with an equal weight of preserving-sugar, and boil for nine minutes. Pour the jam into jars and cover with paper soaked in brandy, and then with a bladder or prepared paper.
A short, sugar-heavy preserve that works because currants are among the most pectin-rich fruits in the kitchen. The only real variables are the boil and the seal.
- The nine minutes are load-bearingThe book does not say when the clock starts, but jam timings of this kind are conventionally counted from the moment the pan reaches a full rolling boil rather than from when it goes on the heat. Red and white currants carry so much pectin and acid that they set fast; boiled to fifteen or twenty minutes the jam tends to turn darker, stiffer and faintly caramelised.
- Test rather than trustPan width and fruit ripeness shift the timing, so check the set at nine minutes: 220F on a thermometer, or a spoonful chilled on a cold saucer that wrinkles when pushed.
- Preserving-panA wide, shallow pan with a large surface area for evaporation. Use the broadest heavy stainless or enamelled pot you own; avoid aluminium, which reacts with fruit acid. Unlined copper was the traditional preserving-pan metal, though modern advice is to limit long contact between bare copper and acidic fruit.
- Preserving-sugarLarge-crystal cane sugar sold for jam-making, valued because it dissolved without settling and scorching. Ordinary granulated sugar is equivalent here; do not use jam sugar with added pectin, which the currants make unnecessary.
- Equal weight means equal weightWeigh the destalked fruit and match it gram for gram. Two pounds of currants with two pounds of sugar yields roughly five to six half-pint jars.
- Stalking the fruitComb the currants off their strigs with the tines of a fork over a bowl. Slightly underripe fruit is an advantage, being higher in pectin and sharper in flavour.
- The seal is obsoleteBrandy-soaked paper, a dried bladder or gummed "prepared paper" excluded air well enough for a cool larder but will grow surface mould in a modern warm kitchen. Use sterilised jars with two-piece lids, filled hot and processed in a boiling-water bath by current guidance, or keep the jam refrigerated and eat it within a month.
- White currantsThey give a paler, milder jam with less colour to lose, so keep the boil brisk and brief; overcooking turns them a dull amber.
Red and white currants (Ribes rubrum, the white simply an albino cultivar of the same species) were a staple of nineteenth-century American kitchen gardens and market stalls, prized less for eating out of hand than for their acidity and pectin, which made them the most reliable jelly and jam fruit available before commercial pectin. That is why this recipe can get away with nothing but fruit, sugar and nine minutes. It appears in Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection alongside dozens of other basic larder preparations. Currants became scarce in much of the United States in the decades after this book was published, when states began banning Ribes cultivation as a host of white pine blister rust; the federal ban was lifted in 1966, though some state prohibitions persisted much later, New York relaxing its rules only in 2003, and the fruit has never fully returned to American markets.