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Currant and Red Raspberry Jam
Equal parts of ripe currants and raspberries; stew and strain currants, boil and add sugar as for jelly; when it jells, add berries; cook about fifteen minutes. Put in glass cans and seal.
A two-fruit jam that leans on the currants for setting power and uses the raspberries mainly for flavor and texture. The instructions assume you already know how to make jelly, so most of the detail is missing.
- The hingeBring the sweetened currant juice to a full set before the raspberries go in. If you add the berries early and then cook the whole mass to the jell point, the raspberries disintegrate and the jam turns to sludge.
- "Sugar as for jelly"Period jelly directions generally called for about equal weights of juice and sugar, i.e. roughly a cup of sugar to each cup of strained juice. Currants are high in both pectin and acid, so that proportion should set.
- Equal partsThe original does not say whether equal parts is by weight or by measure. Weight is the safer reading for fruit this different in density; 2 lb of each is a manageable batch.
- Judging the jell220F on a candy thermometer at sea level, or the classic sheeting test off a cold spoon. Subtract about 2F for every 1,000 feet of elevation.
- Fifteen minutesThat is a long second cooking by modern standards, but it gives the raspberries time to break down and drives off the water they release. Expect the berries to lose their shape; this is a jam, not a preserve of whole fruit.
- Straining the currantsStew the currants with a splash of water until they burst, then press through a jelly bag or fine sieve. This gives the clear, pectin-rich juice the jelly base needs and leaves the seeds and skins behind.
- "Glass cans and seal"Screw-top or clamp-top preserving jars; period examples used zinc caps or glass lids with rubber rings rather than modern two-piece lids. Open-kettle sealing was common practice in this period but is no longer recommended even for high-sugar jams; process filled half-pint jars in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes to guard against surface mold and yeast. Ignore any period advice about paraffin seals.
- YieldNot given. Two pounds each of currants and raspberries, with sugar added to the strained juice, should fill roughly six or seven half-pint jars, depending on how much juice the currants give up.
Currants and red raspberries ripen at much the same time in a northern kitchen garden, which is the practical reason many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century preserve chapters pair them. The currant does the structural work: Ribes rubrum is among the more pectin- and acid-rich fruits available to a cook before commercial pectin was widely sold, and raspberries, which set poorly on their own, borrow that firmness. Directions of this kind lean on currant jelly as a familiar reference point, its method serving as shorthand for other preserves. American currant growing declined in the decades that followed, as white pine blister rust -- for which Ribes species are an alternate host -- brought federal and state restrictions on Ribes planting from around 1920, which is part of the reason a combination this obvious now reads as unfamiliar.