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Currant Jam
Pick from stems and wash thoroughly with the hands, put into a preserving kettle and boil fifteen or twenty minutes, stirring often, and skimming off any scum that may arise; then add sugar in the proportion of three-fourths pound sugar to one pound fruit, or, by measure, one coffee-cup of sugar to one pint mashed fruit; boil thirty minutes longer, stirring almost constantly. When done, pour in small jars or glasses, and either seal or secure like jelly, by first pressing paper, cut to fit the glasses, down close on the fruit, and then larger papers, brushed on the inside with white of eggs, with the edges turned down over the outside of the glass.
A plain nineteenth-century jam: fruit cooked down first, sugar added second, no added pectin. Currants carry enough acid and pectin of their own to set without help, so the main adjustments are to the sealing method and to the very long boil.
- The hinge: stop at the set, not the clockFifty minutes of total boiling will darken the fruit and can push it past a jam set into something stiff and caramelised. Start testing after about 10 minutes of hard boiling with the sugar in: a spoonful chilled on a cold saucer should wrinkle when pushed, or the thermometer should read 220F at sea level.
- Coffee-cupTake this as roughly a cupful, about 8 fl oz; the book does not define the measure, and coffee cups and teacups were not always reckoned the same size. The weight ratio given alongside it, three-quarters pound sugar to one pound fruit, is the more reliable of the two.
- Preserving kettleA wide, heavy, non-reactive pan. Currant juice is acidic enough to pick up metallic flavours from bare copper, aluminium or cast iron, so use stainless steel or enamelled cast iron. Width matters more than depth for evaporation.
- Which currantsThe recipe does not say which kind. Red currants give the clear ruby jam; black currants work but need a little more water at the start and yield a much stronger, muskier preserve. Dried Zante "currants" are a raisin and are not a substitute.
- Sourcing the fruitFresh currants are seasonal and regional in the United States, and cultivation is still restricted in some states because of white pine blister rust. Frozen currants work perfectly well for jam and can be used straight from the freezer.
- The paper-and-egg-white cover is not a sealA disc of paper on the surface with an egg-glazed paper cap over the rim kept dust and some mould off a jar stored cold and dark, and nothing more. Use two-piece canning lids and process filled half-pint jars in a boiling water bath, or treat the finished jam as a refrigerator preserve and eat it within a month.
- SkimmingThe scum is trapped air and protein, not spoilage. Skim it for a clear jam, or stir in a very small knob of butter at the end to disperse the foam.
- YieldFour pounds of stemmed currants with three pounds of sugar will fill somewhere in the region of seven half-pint jars, depending on how far the jam is boiled down.
The Dixie Cook Book belongs to the family of compiled regional cookbooks that Estelle Woods Wilcox is generally credited with assembling in the 1880s, and like most of them it treats jelly and jam as household economy rather than as a luxury: fruit that ripened all at once had to be turned into something that would keep until spring. Currants were a standard dooryard bush in nineteenth-century America, valued precisely because they are sour and full of natural pectin, which meant a cook could get a firm set from nothing but fruit, sugar and time, years before commercial pectin was sold. The egg-white-and-paper closure described at the end was the ordinary domestic seal of the period, used everywhere before the screw-band jar became cheap and universal, and its survival in print here is a good marker of the book's age. Currant bushes largely disappeared from American gardens after federal and state programs began destroying Ribes plants to check white pine blister rust in the early twentieth century, which is why a jam that once needed no explanation now calls for a note on where to find the fruit.