Iced Currants
Wash and drain dry, large bunches of ripe currants, dip into beaten whites of eggs, put on sieve so they will not touch each other, sift powdered sugar thickly over them, and put in a warm place till dry. Cherries and grapes may be prepared in the same way.
This is the old confectioner's trick of frosting fruit in its simplest form, but the method rests on raw egg white that is never heated. A few terms in it also mean something different now than they did in 1883.
- Why the cautionThe egg white is applied raw and then dried in "a warm place" for hours before the fruit is eaten uncooked. Nothing in the process reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and a slow dry in gentle warmth is the growth range for it rather than a barrier. If you want frosted fruit for a table decoration or a dessert garnish, use a current recipe built on pasteurised egg white or meringue powder.
- Currants means the fresh berryThese are red, white or black Ribes currants on the stem, sold in high summer at farm markets. They are not the dried Zante currants of a supermarket baking aisle, which cannot be frosted in bunches.
- Powdered sugar in 1883In American cookbooks of this period powdered sugar usually meant granulated sugar ground fine, closer to today's caster or superfine sugar. Modern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch, which may not set as crisply.
- "A warm place"This means steady, dry, gentle heat well under oven temperature, of the sort a nineteenth-century kitchen could supply near the range or in a sunny spot. No time or temperature is given, so the drying is judged by eye.
- On a sieve, not touchingThe sieve lets air reach all sides so the coating sets rather than sweating. The recipe is explicit that the bunches must not touch each other, presumably to keep them from sticking where they meet.
- The fruit must be dry"Wash and drain dry" is the hinge of the original method. Any surface water thins the egg white, the sugar goes to syrup, and the coating slides off in sheets.
Frosted or "iced" fruit belongs to the nineteenth-century dessert table rather than to the plate: bunches of currants, cherries and grapes were sugared to a frosty bloom and heaped on a compote dish or used to edge a cake or a charlotte, where they read as ice or hoarfrost by candlelight. The Dixie Cook Book was first published in the 1880s. Currants were a short-season crop, and much of the fruit that came into a household was turned into jelly, shrub or wine; this was one of the few ways to serve them looking like themselves. The technique is older than the book and is generally traced to European confectionery practice, where egg white and finely ground sugar were a standard means of glazing everything from marchpane to whole fruits before commercial glazes and gum arabic solutions became easy to buy.