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Currant Catsup
Four pounds nice fully-ripe currants, one and a half pounds sugar, table-spoon ground cinnamon, a tea-spoon each of salt, ground cloves and pepper, pint vinegar; stew currants and sugar until quite thick, add other ingredients, and bottle for use.
A sweet-sour fruit catsup of the type once made in quantity at the end of currant season and served with cold meat. The whole thing is straightforward; the pitfalls are in the ingredient names and in how it is kept.
- Currants means the fresh berryThese are fresh red currants (Ribes rubrum), not the dried Zante currants sold in the baking aisle. Four pounds is somewhere in the range of 12 to 16 cups of stemmed berries depending on how they pack; frozen currants work and in fact break down faster.
- Vinegar strengthA pint is 2 cups. Use plain cider or white vinegar at 5 percent acidity. Wine vinegars and specialty vinegars vary and will change both the acidity and the flavour balance.
- Spices go in last for a reasonGround cinnamon, cloves and pepper added at the start of a long reduction turn dull and slightly bitter. Stirring them in near the end, as written, keeps them bright. "Pepper" here means ground black pepper.
- How thick is thickStew the currants and sugar uncovered until the mass mounds on a spoon and a track drawn across the pan bottom holds for a second or two. Depending on the pan and the heat this can take an hour or more, with regular stirring once it thickens; fruit this high in sugar scorches quickly.
- Seeds and skinsThe original leaves them in. For a smoother sauce, press the cooked pulp through a food mill or sieve before adding the vinegar and spices, then return it to the pan to finish.
- Bottling and keeping"Bottle for use" assumed a cool cellar and rapid consumption. Ladle it hot into clean jars, cool, and keep it in the refrigerator, where it holds for several months. For shelf storage, follow a current tested water-bath processing schedule for a fruit catsup rather than simply capping the jars.
- Yield and servingYield depends on how far the fruit is reduced before the vinegar goes in. It is a condiment, not a sauce for pasta or a base for stew: a spoonful alongside cold ham, roast pork, game, lamb or a sharp cheese.
Before catsup meant tomato and nothing else, the word covered any thin, spiced, vinegared condiment made to be bottled and drawn on through the winter — walnut, mushroom, oyster, grape, gooseberry, currant. The Dixie Cook Book, compiled in the 1880s, still groups them all together in a single section on catsups and sauces, and currants earn a place because they were, by most accounts, a dependable soft fruit in a Southern or Midwestern kitchen garden, ripening in a short glut that had to be dealt with at once. The cinnamon-and-clove seasoning marks this as a descendant of the sweet-sour spiced fruit sauces English cooks had been putting up since the eighteenth century, meant to cut the richness of cold roast meat on a table with no refrigeration. Red currants have since largely dropped out of American cultivation, partly because the bushes host white pine blister rust and were the subject of state eradication and planting bans through much of the twentieth century — which is why a recipe that assumed four pounds on hand now reads like a challenge.