Multicolor currant-berry jam

It's backyard berry season again at the home of our friends Susan and Larry, and they kindly let me and Andrew pick to our heart's content in the currant and black raspberry bushes. Currant bushes, having no thorns, are much kinder on the hands than raspberry bushes. The fruit hangs in these adorable little vertical clumps, with the berries on the end of the clump sometimes ripening and getting larger before the others. It's much easier to gauge ripeness of red currants than white currants. White currants seem to be the same color whether they are ripe or not.

Susan informed me that currants have an impressively high natural amount of pectin, so they make very firm jam and can be a great addition to a jam of other fruits that would otherwise need long cooking with lots of sugar and lemon juice or pectin-rich store-bought canning additives to make a good jam. I'm not too familiar with currants, having never cooked with them before, so I wanted a jam that mostly tasted like currants so I'd know if I liked them. With the day's harvest of currants and blackberries,

it was just the right volume of fruit to fill a few jam jars. I didn't even have to measure the sugar closely, I just added enough to make the mixture a little sweeter.

Susan was so right about currants being rich in pectin. This jam was the most solidly gelled jam I've ever made. It's stiff enough to offer some serious resistance to my spoon and keep its shape as I scoop it out of the jar onto my toast. With a little additional work, this jam would make a fantastic dried preserve like those dried marmalades put up in boxes in Elinor Fettiplace's Receipt Book, a collection of late 16th-century and early 17th-century English recipes.

I deemed the experiment a success. Currants have a sweet-tart fruit flavor I love, the seeds are small enough and soft enough not to bother me when I left them in the jam, and the color of the jam is bright red and very appealing. If I have the privilege of picking currants again, I'll try mixing the berries with other fruits for new jam combinations.

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