No. 600

Currant or Gooseberry Sauce with Sugar

Sauce aux Groseilles Blanches ou Vertes au Sucre

Pick one pound of white currants from their stalks, or pick off the stems from one pound of gooseberries; blanch either one or the other, and then drain them on a sieve. Have cooked half a pound of sugar to the small crack, lay in the currants, let it boil up once, and then pour it into glasses to serve cold with meats, game or poultry.

← No. 599 Cumberland Sauce Cold Sauces No. 601 Currant Sauce with Orange →

For the Modern Kitchen

A two-ingredient fruit relish from Ranhofer's Delmonico's kitchen: fruit suspended in a hard sugar syrup, set in glasses and served cold alongside roast meat. Everything depends on cooking the sugar to the right stage.

"The small crack"An old confectioner's sugar stage, roughly 275-280F on a candy thermometer (the hard-crack most cooks know today is 300-310F). Cook 8 oz sugar with about 2-3 tablespoons water, uncovered and undisturbed, until it reaches that reading; the syrup should be pale and thread hard and brittle when dropped into cold water.
The hinge: one boil onlyThe fruit goes into the hot sugar and comes back to a boil once, and no more. Currants and gooseberries collapse into jam within a minute or two of sustained boiling, and the point here is whole, distinct berries in a clear syrup.
BlanchingBrief immersion in boiling water, half a minute or so, then straight onto a sieve to drain. The recipe gives no time; the point is presumably to soften the skins so they take the syrup without bursting. Drain thoroughly — water left clinging will thin the hot sugar and slacken the set.
White currants and gooseberriesWhite currants are an old market fruit still grown by specialists but rare in shops; red currants work with the same method and give a sharper, more coloured sauce. Use gooseberries hard and green rather than ripe and soft. The recipe asks only that the stems be picked off, though topping and tailing is the usual preparation.
"Glasses"Small jelly glasses or tumblers, filled hot and left to cool and firm. Any small heatproof jar or ramekin does the same job.
Not a preserveThere is no processing here and the sugar-to-fruit ratio is well below jam strength, so this will not keep on a shelf. Cool it, cover it, refrigerate it, and use within about a week.
Yield and servingOne pound of fruit with half a pound of sugar gives something over a pint — eight to ten servings as a condiment. Ranhofer directs it to be served cold with meats, game or poultry, in the same role as the Cumberland sauce that precedes it in the book.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) sets down thirty-odd years of cooking at Delmonico's in New York, and its cold-sauce chapter is essentially a French repertory adapted to American tables. Sharp fruit sauces for game are old across northern Europe — gooseberry with mackerel is a long-standing English pairing, and the association with goose is largely folk tradition attached to the fruit's name — and currant preparations sit beside the Cumberland sauce numbered just before this one. What arguably dates the entry is the technique: rather than stewing the fruit into a jam, Ranhofer cooks sugar to a precise confectioner's stage and drops blanched berries into it, a pastry-kitchen method applied to a savoury accompaniment. That reflects a nineteenth-century restaurant brigade in which the sugar stages — thread, ball, crack — were part of the working repertory. White currants themselves point to the period: widely grown in American and European gardens then, they have since become much less common, a decline that also owes something to Ribes restrictions in the United States.