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Currant Jelly
Mrs. J. P. Holt.
Jam and strain the currants; to each pint of juice add one pound sugar; boil the juice fifteen minutes without sugar, and the same time after it is in; strain into glasses. When pouring hot fruit or jelly in cans or glasses, wring a towel out of cold water, lay it on a table, and set the cold cans upon it, pouring the boiling fruit into them. Care should be taken not to set two cans on the same spot without first wetting the towel.
A plain red-currant jelly of the pre-commercial-pectin era, where the fruit's own acid and pectin did all the work. Two things need updating: the very long boil and the nineteenth-century method of filling the glasses.
- "Jam the currants"Here jam is the verb: crush the fruit to break the skins. Stems and all can go in the pot, since everything is strained out afterward; a splash of water helps the crushing along if the currants are firm.
- MeasuresA pint of juice is 2 cups; a pound of granulated sugar is about 2¼ cups. The ratio works out near equal volumes of juice and sugar, which is still standard for currant jelly.
- StrainingPour the crushed fruit through a jelly bag or several layers of damp cheesecloth and let it drip. Squeezing the bag forces pulp through and gives cloudy jelly.
- The thirty minutes of boilingFifteen minutes before the sugar and fifteen after is more than red currants need, and the long cook darkens the color and can break the pectin down. Boil the sweetened juice hard and test instead: 220F on a thermometer, or a spoonful that sheets rather than drops. Depending on the size of the batch and the pan, that often arrives in well under fifteen minutes.
- No added pectinRed currants are among the highest-pectin, highest-acid fruits, which is why this recipe needs nothing but juice and sugar. Use fruit that is just ripe rather than overripe; pectin falls off as currants soften.
- The towel trickThe cold wet towel was insurance against thermal shock in soft, unevenly annealed glass. Modern canning jars are far more uniform and better able to take the heat, and the better practice is the reverse: fill jars that are hot, straight from rinsing in hot water.
- Sealing"Strain into glasses" meant jelly tumblers, commonly sealed with paraffin, a method no longer recommended because the wax seal can fail and admit mold. Fill hot half-pint jars to a quarter inch of the rim, apply lids, and process five to ten minutes in a boiling water bath, or refrigerate and use within a few weeks.
- YieldRoughly 4 lb of currants gives about a quart of juice, which with 2 lb of sugar makes four to five half-pint jars.
Currant jelly was the workhorse preserve of the nineteenth-century North American kitchen, and books like The Home Cook Book (compiled in Toronto in 1877 from contributions by named local women, in a charitable community-cookbook format already established in the United States from the 1860s and on which the Toronto book drew) tend to carry several versions of it side by side. Red currants ripen in a short midsummer window, bear heavily on a bush that tolerates cold, and set firmly without help, which made jelly the obvious way to hold the crop; the jelly then served all winter as a sweet on bread, a glaze, and above all the standard accompaniment to mutton, venison and game. The wet-towel instruction is a reminder of what the vessels were: not screw-top jars but thin blown tumblers and tin-topped cans, liable to crack under boiling syrup, and prone to the mold that a paraffin cap never quite kept out.