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Currant Syrup
Procure twenty-five pounds ripe currants, place in large wooden pail, mash with hands and let ferment for twenty-four hours, remove from pail and press all juice out through sieve into a large basin. Take up juice by quarts, pour it into a copper basin, add a pound granulated sugar for each quart of juice, and mix with wooden spoon until sugar is melted. Place basin on brisk fire and briskly boil for twelve minutes, frequently mixing and skimming froth off surface meanwhile. Remove to a table, let slightly cool off, pour syrup into thoroughly cleaned bottles, let stand without corking for twelve hours, tightly cork, place in a closet and use whenever required. N. B. Two or three pounds ripe, fresh raspberries added to currants at beginning of operation will greatly improve flavour of syrup.
This is a French-style fruit syrup scaled for a household that put up gallons at a time, and the preserving method is the part that has not aged well. The points below explain the vocabulary and quantities, and why the finished bottles cannot be stored the way the text directs.
- Why it fails: no seal, no processThe syrup is poured into bottles, deliberately left uncorked for twelve hours, then corked and kept in a closet at room temperature. An open vessel of sweet fruit juice at ambient temperature will pick up airborne yeasts and mould spores, and a pushed cork is not a hermetic seal. Nothing in the method sterilises the bottles or the headspace after filling.
- Why it fails: the sugar is too low to preserveOne pound of sugar per quart of juice is roughly 450 g to a litre — around 30 per cent sugar by weight before any reduction. Shelf-stable fruit syrups run far higher, or else are heat-processed and sealed. At this concentration the water activity stays high enough for yeasts and moulds to work.
- Why it fails: a deliberate 24-hour wild fermentMashing 25 lb of currants in an open wooden pail and letting them stand a day is an intentional uncontrolled fermentation; the usual explanation is that it breaks down pectin so the fruit presses more freely, though the recipe does not say so. Wooden pails are porous and hard to sanitise, and the microbial population that develops is whatever happens to be in the room. Use a current, tested syrup or cordial recipe instead.
- The copper basinUnlined copper is traditional for confectionery and short boils, but acidic fruit held in it — or cooled in it, as here — leaches copper. If you have inherited an unlined copper preserving pan, it is for brief boiling and immediate decanting, never for standing.
- Twenty-five pounds of currantsRed currants press out to roughly 60–65 per cent of their weight in juice, so expect somewhere near fifteen to sixteen pounds of juice from the full quantity — about seven to eight quarts — and with a pound of sugar to each quart, on the order of ten quarts of finished syrup. This is a farmhouse batch, not a kitchen one.
- "Brisk fire" and the twelve minutesA brisk fire means the highest sustained heat the pan will take — a hard rolling boil. Twelve minutes at that rate reduces the syrup only slightly; the aim is to dissolve and clarify, not to reach a jelly set. The froth skimmed off is coagulated protein and fruit debris, and removing it is what keeps the bottled syrup clear.
- The raspberry noteThe N. B. is sound advice on its own terms. Red currants are high in acid and pectin but thin in aroma; two or three pounds of raspberry carries the perfume that currants lack.
Currant syrup is the English name for sirop de groseille, a fixture of French domestic and café life, poured over ice, stirred into water as a summer drink, and used to tint and sweeten desserts. Red currants were a standard fruit-garden crop across northern Europe and the northeastern United States before commercial cultivation dwindled in the twentieth century — in parts of the US, currant and gooseberry planting was restricted for decades because the bushes host white pine blister rust, which is a large part of why the fruit became unfamiliar to American cooks. The presence of a 25-pound recipe in a general cookbook says something about how households of the period handled a glut: the fruit ripens all at once over a few weeks, and syrup was the way to carry that harvest through the year in a form that took up shelf rather than cellar space. The instruction to press through a sieve rather than a jelly bag marks this as a syrup and not a jelly — clarity was wanted, but not at the cost of yield.