Home › Ices, Preserves, and Confections › Currant Lozenges
Currant Lozenges
(England.) Cook 3 quarts of ripe currants with a little water, bruising until soft. Press out all the juice, add 1/4 pound of sugar to each pint, simmer 3/4 hour, add 1/2 ounce of gelatine to each quart of this, stir well, pour into pans. When cold, drying near the fire, cut into diamonds, and dust with sugar. Put away, or serve for dessert or entertainments.
A fruit pastille in the older English sense: currant juice reduced with sugar, set with gelatine, dried and cut into diamonds. The instructions assume a hearthside and a cook who knows when jelly has thickened enough.
- The hinge: add gelatine off the heatTake the reduced juice off the boil before stirring in the softened gelatine. Long boiling weakens gelatine's setting power, and a poorly set sheet will be too soft to cut cleanly.
- Quantities in plain termsThree quarts of currants is roughly 4 lb of fruit on the stem, which may yield somewhere near 3 to 4 cups of pressed juice. A quarter pound of sugar is about 115 g, a half ounce of gelatine about 14 g, or four to five teaspoons of modern powder.
- Sugar is low by preserving standards115 g of sugar to a pint of juice is far below the roughly equal weights used in jam. These are a fresh confection, not a shelf-stable preserve; keep them covered in the refrigerator and eat within a week or two.
- Bloom the gelatine firstScatter the powder over a few tablespoons of cold water and let it stand until spongy, then stir it into the hot juice until no grains remain. Dropping dry gelatine into hot liquid gives lumps that never disperse.
- Which currantsRedcurrants are the usual English choice and give the clearest colour; blackcurrants work but yield a darker, muskier sweet. Both are pectin-rich. These are not dried Zante currants, which are grapes.
- "Drying near the fire"A warm draught, not heat. A very low oven at 120-140F with the door ajar, or a dehydrator on its lowest setting, does the same job in several hours; direct heat will melt the surface and weep syrup.
- Pans and cuttingPour to about half an inch in a shallow tray lined with lightly oiled parchment. Cut with a knife dipped in hot water, then toss the diamonds in caster or granulated sugar so the cut faces do not stick together.
- YieldExpect roughly 60 to 80 small lozenges from this quantity, depending on the depth of the pan.
The lozenge takes its name from the shape rather than the sweet: a rhombus, the diamond of heraldry, a convenient way to cut a sheet of set jelly with a knife. English cookery had long made currant paste and "jellies of fruit" for the dessert course, where such sweetmeats were arranged alongside candied peel and comfits, and they belong to the same family as the French pâte de fruits. What marks this version as turn-of-the-century is the gelatine, doing work that in earlier receipts fell to the pectin in the fruit and long boiling with a great deal more sugar. Redcurrants were a standard fixture of the English kitchen garden and fruited heavily over a short season, which is the practical reason a household would want three quarts of them turned into something other than fresh fruit.