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Currant Pickle
Four quarts of currants, two pounds of brown sugar, two tablespoonfuls of cinnamon, allspice one tablespoonful, cloves one-half tablespoonful, one pint vinegar. Boil until thick.
This is a spiced fruit preserve rather than a brined pickle: fruit, sugar, vinegar and ground spice cooked down to a thick relish for serving with roast meat. The original assumes you know what "thick" looks like and says nothing about how to keep it.
- How much fruit that isFour quarts of currants is a volume measure of whole berries, roughly 5 lb stemmed. The recipe does not say which kind; either red or black currants work; red are tarter, black give a much darker, more resinous result.
- The vinegarA pint is 2 cups. Modern household vinegar runs about 5 percent acidity; period vinegar was not standardised and its strength varied. Cider or plain white vinegar is a fair substitute, and cider vinegar suits the brown sugar better.
- Spices are ground, not wholeTablespoon quantities of cinnamon, allspice and cloves only make sense as ground spice, and that is a lot of it: about 3.5 tablespoons total. It is in proportion for six pounds of fruit, but taste as it cooks and hold back some of the clove, which dominates as the mixture reduces.
- "Boil until thick"Expect 30 to 45 minutes at a steady simmer, uncovered, stirring often once it starts to catch. It is done when a spoon drawn across the pan bottom leaves a track that closes slowly, and a spoonful mounded on a cold plate does not weep vinegar around the edge.
- Scorching is the failure modeCurrant skins and brown sugar sink and burn. Use a wide, heavy nonreactive pan (stainless or enamel, not bare aluminium or cast iron, which react with the vinegar) and scrape the bottom, not just the surface.
- Keeping itThe book gives no processing instructions, which was normal in cookbooks of this period. Treat it as a refrigerator preserve: cool, jar, and keep chilled for a month or two. If you want it shelf-stable, follow a current tested water-bath procedure for a sweet fruit pickle rather than simply sealing hot jars.
- Yield and servingYield depends on how far it is reduced; expect somewhere in the region of 3 to 5 pints. It is a condiment, served in small spoonfuls with cold roast beef, ham, game or lamb, and it is good with sharp cheese.
In late nineteenth-century American cookbooks, "pickle" covered any fruit or vegetable preserved in vinegar, and the sweet-and-spiced end of that range was a substantial category in its own right. Spiced fruit was the standard relish for the heavy roasted and cold meats of the period, doing the work that chutney or cranberry sauce does now, and almost any garden fruit was treated this way: peaches, pears, plums, crab apples, grapes, and currants. Currants earned their place because they were a reliable northern bush fruit, high in pectin and acid, so they set firmly with nothing more than sugar and vinegar. Their disappearance from American kitchens is often attributed less to taste than to law: currant and gooseberry bushes host white pine blister rust, and cultivation was widely restricted in the United States from the early twentieth century onward, which is why a recipe calling casually for four quarts of them now reads as exotic.