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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What's cooking this week? Berries!

Our friends who have turned their entire back yard over to food production occasionally find some of the crops getting away from them. My husband and I benefit when they invite us over to help with the picking in exchange for some of the harvest.

This week, we helped pick blackberries and gooseberries. Many thorn scratches and pokes later, we had enough blackberries to eat them for breakfast a few days and make jam plus enough gooseberries for a pie.

I have not eaten a gooseberry pie since I was a kid in Minnesota, where my parents found some growing wild one year and brought them home. This year's pie is just out of the oven, so I can't say yet whether it tastes the way the first one did. The berries are different, since the ones we picked this week were light red and sweeter than the tart green ones I remember from the childhood pie.

Here is the recipe I devised after looking up a few recipes online and picking out what I liked from about three of them.

Gooseberry Pie
makes one double-crust 9-inch pie

3 1/2 cups gooseberries
250 to 300 grams (about 1 1/2 cups) sugar (use more or less depending on tartness desired)
3 Tbsp instant tapioca (e.g. Minit)
1/2 tsp salt
two 9-inch pie crusts (my favorite recipe is from Cooks Illustrated, part of their "Best Blueberry Pie" article from 2008)
Optional: 2 Tbsp of milk and 1 Tbsp sugar

Prepare pie plate with bottom crust. Place in refrigerator while cooking filling. Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Crush 1/2 berries in a saucepan, add sugar, tapioca and salt and 1 tsp water to wet the sugar.  Cook gently until mixture comes to a boil, stir frequently and cook another 3 minutes. Remove from heat and stir in the rest of the berries.

Roll out top pie crust. Pour filling into prepared bottom pie crust, then cover with top crust. Cut off excess crust and crimp the edges to seal in the filling. If desired, brush top crust with the optional 2 Tbsp milk and sprinkle with the optional 1 Tbsp sugar. Cut slits and holes in top crust to allow steam to escape. Bake 35 minutes at 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Cover edges with aluminum foil if the crust edge starts to brown.

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