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Red Currant Marmalade
Take two quarts of ripe red currants, pick off the stalks and put them in a preserving-pan with two breakfast cupfuls of raspberry juice, and boil gently. When the currants begin to break mix one pint of syrup boiled to the candying degree with them and boil the whole until reduced to a thick pulp. Skim the marmalade, flavor with rose-water, and pour into jars. When the marmalade is cold, cover the jars with brandied papers and tie down tightly. Keep in a cool place.
A straightforward high-pectin preserve, but two things in it need translating: the pre-boiled sugar syrup and the paper-and-brandy covering that stands in for a modern seal.
- QuantitiesTwo quarts of currants is roughly 2 1/4 lb (about 1 kg) once stemmed. A "breakfast cupful" is a large cup, 8 to 10 fl oz, so the raspberry juice comes to about 2 to 2 1/2 cups.
- Syrup boiled to the candying degreeA heavy sugar syrup, cooked well past soft ball. Nineteenth-century confectioners' "candy" degree is not a single agreed number, so treat it as a firm-to-hard-ball syrup rather than a precise thermometer reading. A pint of finished syrup starts from roughly 2 1/2 cups sugar and 3/4 cup water. Cooking the sugar separately first belongs to the older confectioner's practice and was held to keep fruit colour bright.
- The hinge: do not overcook after the sugar goes inRed currants are among the most pectin-rich fruits there are, and the syrup goes in already heavily concentrated. Once the two are combined the mixture sets quickly. Start testing on a chilled saucer as soon as it thickens rather than boiling to a fixed time; "reduced to a thick pulp" will come sooner than with a low-pectin fruit.
- Marmalade, not jellyNothing here is strained, and the skins and seeds stay in — an 1896 marmalade meant any fruit boiled to a pulp with sugar, not specifically citrus. If you want it smooth, press the cooked pulp through a sieve before adding the syrup.
- Rose-waterStrength varies a great deal between brands, and modern rose-water may well be stronger than what this kitchen used. Start with a teaspoon stirred in off the heat and taste; two teaspoons in this quantity is already assertive.
- Brandied papers are not a sealA round of paper dipped in brandy laid directly on the cold surface, with a second tied over the rim, was a common covering for preserves before screw bands. It suppresses surface mould; it does not sterilise. Fill sterilised jars and refrigerate, or process filled jars in a boiling-water bath according to current preserving guidance.
- YieldAbout 3 to 4 cups, so three or four half-pint jars.
Red currant preserves were once a fixture of European confectionery — the celebrated confiture de groseilles of Bar-le-Duc, in which the seeds were picked out of each berry by hand with a goose quill, was the luxury version of exactly this idea. The syrup-to-the-candying-degree method and the brandied paper covering both belong to an older confectioner's tradition that Oscar Tschirky's 1896 Cook Book preserved wholesale, alongside the raspberry juice, which is there for colour and perfume as much as flavour, and the rose-water, a flavouring often said to have been going out of fashion in American kitchens by the 1890s in favour of vanilla and lemon. The recipe also dates itself by its main ingredient: currants and gooseberries (both Ribes) host white pine blister rust, and cultivation was restricted in much of the United States in the early twentieth century, which is why a fruit an 1890s hotel cook could buy by the quart is now a farmers'-market rarity in parts of the country.