No. 3678

Large White Currants, Bar-le-Duc Jelly

Confiture de Groseilles de Bar-le-Duc

Have one pound of large picked white currants and a pound of loaf sugar; seed the fruits, using a pointed goose quill, and lay them in a vessel. Put half a pound of the sugar into a sugar pan with two gills of water, let it soak, then cook it to "bead" (No. 171); mix in the berries, leaving their juice in the vessel, and place the pan on the side of the range; five minutes later pour both fruits and liquid into a bowl, and three hours after lay a small sieve over the sugar pan and pour the fruits and syrup into this. Mix with the syrup half of the remaining sugar, and let it melt thoroughly, then cook it until it coats the skimmer and drops from it in beads; return the currants to the syrup; give them a single boil and return the whole to the bowl. Four hours after strain the syrup into the pan again, put the rest of the sugar with it and cook once more until it coats the skimmer; now add the currants and boil the whole up once. Set the pan back on the range for five minutes, but so that the syrup does not boil. Pour the jam into small jelly glasses; let get very cold before closing with paper. A few spoonfuls of clear apple juice can be added if necessary to give more consistency to the preserve.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's version of the famous seeded currant preserve of Lorraine. The technique is a staged one: the fruit is barely cooked, while the syrup is concentrated separately over three sittings so the berries stay whole and translucent.

The hinge: the currants are never really boiledEach stage gives the fruit "a single boil" or five minutes off the direct heat, and the final rest must stay below boiling. All the reduction is done to the syrup alone, with the berries out of the pan. Boil the fruit and the skins collapse, which is the one fault this preserve cannot have.
Two gillsA gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup of water to the first half pound of sugar.
"Bead" and "coats the skimmer"These are stages in Ranhofer's table of sugar degrees (No. 171); bead is generally put at around 220-222F, the point where a lifted skimmer sheds syrup in slow round drops rather than a sheet. That is close to a modern jam set, so a thermometer is a useful check.
Loaf sugarRefined cane sugar sold in cones or blocks and broken up for use. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct equivalent; a pound is about 2 1/4 cups.
Seeding the fruitThe quill is cut to a fine point and the seeds worked out through a small opening without splitting the berry. A sharpened plastic straw or a very fine pair of tweezers does the same work. It is very slow, and it is the whole point of the preserve.
Finding white currantsWhite currants are the pale cultivar of Ribes rubrum, sold briefly in midsummer at farmers' markets and almost never in supermarkets; frozen berries can be substituted but thaw soft and are much harder to seed whole. Red currants make the red version of the same preserve, with the same method.
The apple juiceThis is a pectin correction, and it needs juice pressed from fresh tart apples, or the strained liquid from simmered apple cores and peels. Clarified bottled apple juice contributes nothing but water and sugar.
Timing and yieldTiming -- The three-hour and four-hour rests are not optional -- they are what draws syrup into the fruit -- so budget a full day.
SealingPaper covers were a dust guard, not a seal. Treat the finished glasses as a refrigerator preserve, or use current water-bath canning directions for a shelf-stable jar.

A Little History

Bar-le-Duc, in the Meuse, was the seat of the duchy of Bar, later united with Lorraine, and has made seeded currant preserve since at least the late Middle Ages; the town's epepineuses pick the seeds from each berry with a sharpened goose quill, a job still done by hand there today. A gift of the preserve to a visiting noble is often cited as the earliest record, though the various dates attached to that story are traditional rather than documented. What is clear is why it reached Ranhofer's kitchen at Delmonico's: the labour of seeding by quill made it a costly preserve, sold in small glass jars and eaten by the spoonful with cheese, foie gras or plain bread rather than spread like jam. Its nickname, usually given as the caviar de Bar, comes from that combination of tiny whole spheres and a luxury price, and its presence in a nineteenth-century American cookbook marks a house cooking at the outer edge of what an ambitious kitchen would attempt.