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Raspberries with Currant Juice
Ten pounds of red or black raspberries, twelve pounds of granulated sugar, one quart currant juice. Make syrup of the sugar and juice; when boiling add the fruit, and continue for ten minutes. Put in glass cans and fasten immediately.
This is a soft preserve rather than plain canned fruit — the sugar and currant juice do the work of setting it. The proportions are sound; the packing method is the part that current practice has replaced.
- Scale it downTen pounds of berries with twelve pounds of sugar and a quart of juice yields roughly fourteen to sixteen pints, which suits a farm pantry more than a modern one. A fifth of the recipe — 2 lb berries, 2 lb 6 oz sugar, a scant cup of currant juice — gives about three pints and fits an 8-quart pot.
- The currant juice is not for flavorThe currant juice is not only for flavor -- Red currants are high in both pectin and acid, and raspberries are comparatively low in pectin, so the quart of juice is largely what makes this set. (The raspberries are acidic enough on their own for safe canning; the juice is doing the setting work, not the acidifying.) Substituting water, or bottled raspberry juice, will tend to give you syrup with berries floating in it.
- Getting the juiceAbout 3 lb of stemmed red currants simmered with a splash of water until they collapse, then strained through a jelly bag, yields close to a quart. Do not press or squeeze the bag if you want the preserve clear. Frozen currants work as well as fresh.
- "Glass cans"These were screw-top or wire-bail jars with rubber gaskets. Modern two-piece lids are the equivalent; "fasten immediately" meant sealing while everything was still near boiling so the cooling headspace pulled a vacuum.
- Open-kettle packingFilling hot jars and simply sealing them is no longer considered adequate, even for a high-sugar, high-acid preserve — the seal is unreliable and the jar rims are not sterilized by contact with hot fruit alone. Current guidance is to fill sterilized jars to ¼ inch headspace and process in a boiling-water bath, and any up-to-date preserving source will give the time for your jar size and altitude.
- The ten minutesTen minutes at a full rolling boil is right for raspberries; longer and the drupelets disintegrate into pulp and the fresh flavor cooks off. Add the fruit to syrup that is already boiling hard so the pot returns to the boil quickly.
- Skim and restRaspberries throw a good deal of pink foam. Skim it off at the end of the boil, then let the pot stand five minutes off the heat and stir gently before filling, so the berries distribute through the syrup instead of rising to the top of every jar.
Pairing raspberries with currants is old household chemistry arrived at by trial rather than theory: cooks knew long before pectin was isolated and named in the early nineteenth century that certain fruits — currants, quinces, apples, gooseberries — would make a soft fruit "jelly up," while raspberries and strawberries left to themselves would not. Recipes like this one solved the problem by borrowing the setting power of one fruit for another, which is why so many nineteenth-century preserve books quietly assume a currant bush in the garden. The ten-pound batch size reflects a kitchen putting up a whole crop at once rather than a few jars for the shelf.