Currant Jelly

History

This recipe is recorded in "What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking" (San Francisco, 1881), the work of Abby Fisher — one of the earliest known cookbooks by an African American author, and the second known cookbook by a Black woman in the United States after Malinda Russell's "Domestic Cook Book" (1866). Fisher was born in Orangeburg, South Carolina, in June 1831 to Abbie Clifton, and after emancipation settled in San Francisco, where she worked as a pickle and preserve manufacturer. Genealogical research in San Francisco records identifies her father as James J. Andrews, an Orangeburg planter who held some seventy people in slavery, and an 1869 receipt from the Freedman's Savings and Trust in Mobile records her under her mother's name. Before 1865, censuses recorded only an enslaver's name with the age and sex of those he held, so no surviving record names Fisher herself; Karen Hess, who rediscovered her book, noted that absence of documentation. Unable to read or write, she dictated the book's recipes; in her own preface she presents it as "a book of my knowledge — based on an experience of upwards of thirty-five years" in cooking and in "making Jellies, Pickles, Sauces... preserving Fruits".

Preserving is not incidental to Fisher's expertise but central to it: the title page records that she was awarded two medals at the San Francisco Mechanics' Institute Fair, 1880, for best pickles and sauces and best assortment of jellies and preserves, together with a diploma from the Sacramento State Fair, 1879. This currant jelly — juice pressed from fresh fruit, boiled with an equal measure of pre-heated sugar, skimmed clear, tested on a saucer, and sealed under brandy-wetted paper — belongs to that award-winning body of preserving work set down under her own name.

The historical record does not document a specific earlier origin for this particular jelly; it is a fruit preserve of a kind long common in nineteenth-century American kitchens, and here it survives because Abby Fisher chose to record her own method.

Ingredients

• fresh currants
• equal quantity to juice sugar
• brandy
• thin paper

Instructions

1. Select fresh currants that are not leaking juice.
2. Place the currants in a cloth or bag and squeeze the juice thoroughly from the fruit.
3. Strain the juice through a thin cloth and measure it.
4. Measure an equal quantity of granulated sugar.
5. Place the sugar in a baking pan on the stove and heat it through thoroughly, making sure it neither browns nor burns.
6. Pour the currant juice into a porcelain kettle and bring it to a boil.
7. When the juice begins boiling, add the heated sugar.
8. Boil the mixture slowly for thirty minutes, skimming off all the froth or foam that gathers on top to keep the jelly clear.
9. After thirty minutes, dip some of the jelly into a saucer and set it in the air to cool; if it congeals in five minutes, the jelly is done.
10. If the jelly does not congeal in five minutes, continue cooking and test again every ten minutes until it congeals.
11. Dip the glasses in boiling water and turn them upside down to allow the water to drain.
12. Pour the finished jelly into the hot glasses and set them in the air to cool with the jelly inside.
13. Once cold, cut thin paper to fit inside each glass and wet it with brandy.
14. Lay the brandy-soaked paper on top of the jelly inside each glass.
15. Cover the glasses and store them in a dark place.