Black Currant Affairs!
Picking off Stems
A good crop of Black Currants means a day of processing…
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stems
We mixed our home-grown berries with some from a local farm ending up with 1200g.
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Helper
That’s a lot of berries to pick over one at a time – luckily Mormor had a little helper…
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Bowl full!
…and they cleaned up several bowlsfull.
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Sugar!
The currants were boiled with 200 ml water until they made a pulp, then for every 500g of pulp we added 400g of white sugar and some lemon juice.
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Boil and Stir
Mormor boiled and stirred the hot jam…
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Bottling
…and bottled some up for the Hittys…
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Washing-up
…while Sitka helped with the washing-up.
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Our recipe is from the BBC Website, though we doubled it:
600 g Black Currants + 100 ml water, boiled until chunky pulp, then cool slightly.
When cooled, weigh the pulp, and for every 500 g of pulp measure 400 g sugar.
Return pulp to the cooking pan, add sugar, and juice of half a lemon, heat till boiling.
Boil hard until 105 degrees C.
Bottle.
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Quimper Hittys 
Lots of readers liked the 2020 jam issue and commented on it so I expect they will again. Mormor is very good at black currant jam.
One of our favourite flavours – thanks so much for the extra punnets! Two jars are on their way to you!
The British are a sweet-toothed nation. I loved the recipe instructions. Sitka SO helpful, and truly valiant to tackle all the dish washing. Marmor too, to supervise the hard boiling and harder bottling. – what a treasured mentor.
We found the resulting jam a bit stiff as a matter of fact! We’ll be trying it with taking it off the heat at a slightly lower temperature next time!
crumpets and jam for breakfast. I’m having trouble just clicking the “like” button. Is it just me or is anyone else having a problem?
WordPress has been iffy for me the last couple of days…m-m-m crumpets! We found the black currant jam pretty good on croissants, and on biscuits…
It’s great to view and read of these “Black Currant Affairs” today. What a sweet and refreshing narrative and homey scenes to contemplate and hold on to.
Thanks! We did enjoy ourselves! Hearing the ping of the lids as they seal themselves, and then putting the lovely pots of dark purple jam in the cupboard is so very satisfying!
so industrious…how good that Mormor had such a wonderful assistant.
Many hands make light work! Mormor is very good at getting help from the Hitty cupboard – and they all enjoy the results!
This is such a sweet post. We always love seeing Mormor and little Sitka is just as special.
Thank you! We haven’t seen much of Mormor lately, but she is busily getting stuff behind the scenes!
We get kilos of black currants and also jostaberries from the allotment – I’ve learned that freezing them loose on a tray, before bagging them up, and then taking them out in small quanities to top and tail is the way to go if I want to jam rather than jelly them. Still very early in the season for our bushes though, so I’m scoffing them (tails too!) with raspberries at the moment. Yumbo!
I’ve heard of Jostaberries but have never eaten them! Our single black currant bush was very productive this year so I have hopes for kilos and kilos some day!