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Spiced Currants
Five pounds of currants, four pounds of sugar, one pint vinegar, one tablespoonful cinnamon, one teaspoonful of cloves; boil slowly three hours.
A sweet-sour currant conserve of the kind eaten with cold meat and game rather than spread on toast. The whole recipe hangs on one word that has changed meaning.
- Which currantsThese are fresh red or black currants (Ribes), sold by the pound in season at market, not the dried Zante currants in the baking aisle. Five pounds of fresh fruit is roughly four to five quarts.
- Sugar by weightFour pounds of granulated sugar is about nine cups. Weigh it if you can; the high proportion of sugar, together with the vinegar, is what helps the finished conserve keep.
- VinegarA pint is two cups. Cider vinegar was the common household vinegar in American kitchens and suits the fruit better than distilled white, which tastes harsher against it.
- SpicesA tablespoon of cinnamon and a teaspoon of cloves most likely means ground spice, and it is a heavy hand by modern taste. Whole spice tied in cheesecloth and lifted out at the end gives a cleaner result if you prefer it.
- The three-hour boilLong, slow reduction is the point — the mixture should go dark, thick and glossy, not merely cooked. Use the widest heavy-bottomed pan you have, stir often toward the end, and expect it to be done sooner than three hours on a modern burner. Judge by consistency: it is ready when a spoonful mounds on a cold plate.
- ScorchingCurrants are full of pectin and this much sugar catches fast once the water is gone. Keep the heat genuinely low in the last half hour and scrape the corners of the pan.
- StorageThe original assumes you know what to do next; the usual practice with preserves of this kind was to pour them hot into scalded jars. For keeping at room temperature, follow current water-bath canning directions for a sweet pickle or conserve. Otherwise jar it, cool it, and keep it in the refrigerator, where it will hold for months.
- YieldA large batch: the four pounds of sugar alone mean several pints of finished conserve, more or less depending how far you reduce it. Serve as a relish with ham, pork, cold roast beef or game.
Spiced fruit belongs to a nineteenth-century American table that expected something sharp and sweet beside every joint of meat, and cookbooks of this period give dozens of them — spiced grapes, spiced gooseberries, spiced peaches, spiced plums — all built on the same frame of fruit, sugar, vinegar and warm spice. Currants were a natural candidate: they grew readily in northern gardens, ripened in a short glut that had to be dealt with at once, and carry enough acid and pectin to set without help. That this recipe sits under "Sweet and Spiced Pickles" rather than among the jams is the useful clue to how it was eaten. Currant growing in the United States declined sharply in the early twentieth century, when the bushes were identified as a host for white pine blister rust and plantings were restricted in many states, which is a large part of why the fruit is now unfamiliar to American cooks who have no trouble finding a jar of currant jelly in Britain.