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Currant Pickles
Scald seven pounds ripe currants in three pounds sugar and one quart vinegar, remove currants to jar, boil for a few moments and pour over the fruit. Some add three pounds of raisins and spices. If not sweet enough, use only one pint vinegar.
A sweet pickle in the older sense: fruit steeped in a hot sugar-and-vinegar syrup and meant to be eaten as a sharp relish with meat, not as a jam. The proportions are workable, but the method assumes a cellar and a cook who checked her jars weekly.
- Which currantRipe red or white currants on the stem, the fresh fruit, not the dried Zante "currants" sold for baking. Seven pounds is roughly six quarts of berries; strip them from the stems first.
- Scale it downSeven pounds of fruit with three pounds of sugar and a quart of vinegar makes a large batch, several quarts of finished pickle. Quartering the recipe (about 1 3/4 lb currants, 12 oz sugar, 1 cup vinegar) gives a manageable amount and behaves the same way.
- The vinegarHome-made cider vinegar of the period varied in strength; modern bottled vinegar is generally around 5 percent. Cider vinegar suits this kind of pickle, though the recipe does not specify one, and take the closing note seriously — with only a pint the pickle is markedly sweeter and softer in acid.
- What gets boiledThe berries are only scalded, then lifted out; it is the syrup that boils for a few moments and is poured back over them hot. Boiling currants hard collapses them into a seedy purée, which is why the recipe separates the two steps.
- Doing it twiceDraining the syrup, reboiling it and pouring it back over the fruit on a second and third day thickens the syrup and plumps the berries without cooking them to pieces. Many period sweet-pickle recipes direct this, though this one does not, and it helps the fruit hold its shape.
- Raisins and spicesThe optional three pounds of raisins is a large addition — they swell and absorb syrup, so expect to need more liquid. "Spices" in recipes of this kind usually meant whole stick cinnamon, cloves and allspice; tie them in a cloth so the syrup does not go muddy or bitter.
- StoragePouring hot syrup into a jar and screwing on the lid is open-kettle canning, which is no longer considered a reliable seal. Currants are highly acidic, so the spoilage risk is mould and yeast rather than anything worse, but keep this batch in the refrigerator and use it within a couple of months, or follow a current tested procedure for shelf storage.
- ServingA tablespoon or two alongside roast pork, ham, cold mutton or game. It is sharp and concentrated; it is not a spread.
Sweet pickles are a familiar category in American cookbooks of the 1880s and 1890s, The Dixie Cook Book among them, and the category covers fruit rather than cucumbers: peaches, pears, crabapples, watermelon rind, grapes, currants. The point was to have something sharp and sweet on the table beside heavy roasted and salted meats through the winter, at a period when the alternative was a bought bottled sauce. Currants suited the method well because their natural acidity, with the sugar and vinegar, does much of the preserving work, and because bushes were common in northern and upland dooryard gardens and the ripe fruit had to be dealt with in a few days. Recipes of this kind are usually written, as this one is, in bare proportions with a variation appended, on the assumption that the reader already knew what a sweet pickle should look and taste like and only needed the ratio.