Redcurrant jam, Empress Felicity style
| That huge redcurrant bush and its less prolific, container-grown sister have yielded about 3 lb (just over 1.3 kg) of fruit. There are a few stragglers, which I will pick in a couple of days’ time… after I’ve been blackberrying. I picked the three pounds of currants gradually, over the course of a couple of weeks, cleaned them, de-stalked them and put them in bags in our freezer. But yesterday I discovered that the freezer has been playing up – either the thermostat is wonky, and/or the rubber seal around the door is on its last legs. Either way, it meant that the currents hadn’t solidified and because I didn’t want to risk them going off, I made jam out of them last night. Making jam in the sweltering heat (yes, summer’s arrived!) is not recommended, but I didn’t want to let all those beautiful currants go to waste. |
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| What do you do when you’re not an expert jam maker? You turn to your mum’s old recipe books of course. In my case, the book is Marguerite Patten’s Cookery in Colour, a worthy tome first published in 1960. There wasn’t a recipe for redcurrant jam, but there was one for blackcurrant jam, so I used that. For the weight of currants I had (2 pounds 10 ounces or 2.625 pounds), I would have needed just under 2 pints of water and just over 3 and a quarter pounds of sugar, according to this recipe. |
| Being chronically incapable of following recipe instructions, I used about 1 pound ten ounces of sugar and just over one pint of water, reasoning that (a) the currants were oozing plenty of juice already, and (b) surely nobody would want THAT much sugar in their jam. Following Mr Beans’ recommendation I also used the juice of half a lemon, to help with setting. |
| The instructions in Ms Patten’s book were: 1. boil up the currants with the water until they go mushy, and (b) add the sugar, stir to dissolve and boil the bejeesus out of the mixture until set. Well, it didn’t say “boil the bejeesus”, but that was the basic gist, anyway. I complied with the instructions, but added the lemon juice and associated pulp about halfway through the boiling process. The result was three jars of a dark garnet red jam, which tastes gorgeous. Because I used so much less sugar (and added some lemon juice), the jam tastes lovely and tart – a real grown-up flavour. |
| If you’re wondering what all my quantities are in metric, here they are:
2 pounds 10 oz (2.625 pounds) currants = 1.2 kg
1 pound 10 oz (1.625 pounds) sugar = 740 g (give or take the odd gram)
1 pint water = 0.56 litres. Actually I used a bit more than a pint, so call it 0.6 litres. |
