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Raspberries and Currants
(Bar-le-Duc.) To 4 pounds of raspberries add 1 pound of currants. Bruise the currants, and strain the juice. Add to it 3/4 pound of sugar to each pound of juice, including the weight of the berries, left whole. Boil and skim for 20 minutes, add the fruit,--raspberries,--and cook 20 minutes more. When the syrup jellies on a plate, take off, and bottle, while hot, in jars.
A high-sugar raspberry preserve set with currant juice, in the style of the Lorraine confitures. The proportions are sound; the timings belong to an era before anyone worried about overcooking fruit.
- Read the sugar ratio carefullyThe sugar is calculated on the combined weight of the strained currant juice and the whole raspberries, not on the juice alone. For 4 lb raspberries and roughly 12 oz of juice from 1 lb currants, that is about 3 1/2 lb sugar.
- The currants are the pectinRaspberries set poorly on their own. The currant juice supplies both acid and pectin, so do not skip it or substitute a sweeter fruit. Slightly underripe currants set better than fully ripe ones.
- Strain the currants properlyBruise, then press through a fine sieve or a jelly bag. Passing pulp and skins through will cloud the finished preserve, which in this style is meant to show whole berries suspended in clear jelly.
- Forty minutes is too longTwenty minutes of boiling syrup plus twenty more with the fruit will darken the jam and break the raspberries down completely. Boil the syrup until it is clear, then add the berries and cook only until the plate test succeeds, usually 8 to 15 minutes on a modern high-output burner.
- The plate testKeep two or three saucers in the freezer. Drop a teaspoon of syrup on a cold one, wait half a minute, and push it with a fingertip: it should wrinkle rather than run. On a thermometer this corresponds to about 220F at sea level.
- Skim, and use a wide panA wide, heavy preserving pan of at least 8 quarts gives the evaporation the recipe assumes and reduces the boil-over risk. Skim the foam as it rises; it is trapped air and fruit protein, harmless but cloudy.
- Bottling"Bottle while hot in jars" was open-kettle canning. For shelf storage, fill clean hot half-pint jars to 1/4 inch of the rim and process 10 minutes in a boiling water bath, adjusting for altitude. Otherwise treat it as a refrigerator preserve and use it within a month.
- YieldRoughly 8 to 10 half-pint jars, depending on how far you take the set.
Bar-le-Duc, in Lorraine, has long been known for a jewel-like currant preserve in which each berry is seeded by hand, traditionally with the tip of a goose quill, and left whole in a pale syrup. The work is slow enough that the local confiture has long been sold as a luxury by the small jar, and it was widely known outside France by the nineteenth century. This version is a domestic approximation rather than the article itself: it borrows the principle, whole fruit suspended in a clear currant jelly, and applies it to raspberries, which need no seeding and carry the currant's acidity well.