Ribes nigrum (the blackcurrant) · R. rubrum (the redcurrant, and the pale-fruited cultivars sold as whitecurrants) · R. spicatum and R. petraeum (the northern and montane parents of the garden redcurrant) · and, quite separately, Vitis vinifera 'Black Corinth' (the Zante or dried currant, a seedless grape)
Origin: Two unrelated origins under one name: the wild <em>Ribes</em> currants of the temperate north, the blackcurrant across northern and central Europe and on through Russia into Siberia, and the redcurrant through the damp woods of western Europe from the Pyrenees to the Rhine; and, wholly separate from both, the tiny seedless grape of Corinth and the northern Peloponnese, whose dried fruit carried the word 'currant' into English
No other entry in this atlas is required to hold two plants that are not merely different species but members of different botanical orders, and yet the word 'currant' does exactly that. On one side stand the true currants, the genus Ribes of the family Grossulariaceae, low woody shrubs of the cool north that bear their fruit in hanging racemes, the pickers' 'strigs', each berry a true berry with its seeds suspended in translucent pulp. Three of them matter in the kitchen. The blackcurrant, Ribes nigrum, is the aromatic one: its leaves are studded with resinous glands that release, when bruised, the pungent, dark, faintly catty scent that carries the whole character of the plant, and its fruit is musky, tannic, and almost unpleasant raw whilst being transformed by heat and sugar into something extraordinary. The redcurrant, R. rubrum, is the acid one: translucent scarlet, sharply sour, and so exceptionally rich in pectin that it sets to a firm, clear jelly with no help beyond sugar. The whitecurrant is not a separate species at all but a pale-fruited cultivar of the redcurrant, sweeter and milder for having lost its pigment, and it is grown chiefly by gardeners who like the way it looks in a bowl.
On the other side stands a grape. Vitis vinifera 'Black Corinth' is a vine of the northern Peloponnese bearing minute, thin-skinned, intensely sweet black grapes that set no seed; because a seedless vine can be perpetuated only by cutting, every plant of it now growing is in effect the same individual that the Corinthians grew, one of the oldest continuously propagated cultivars on earth. Dried, its fruit is not a small raisin but a distinct article: hard, almost black, sharply flavoured, and small enough to scatter evenly through a dough as no larger dried grape can. This is the currant of the British baking tin, of the Christmas pudding and the Eccles cake, and of the Ottoman pilav; and it is the older claimant to the name, for the northern berries were christened after it.
The two lineages could hardly differ more in the antiquity of their cultivation. The Corinthian vine is a plant of the classical Mediterranean, its dried fruit a commodity of the ancient and medieval trade routes. The Ribes currants, by contrast, are amongst the very last European fruits to enter the garden, and they have no classical past whatever: they grow where Greeks and Romans did not, and neither Theophrastus nor Dioscorides nor Pliny describes anything that can confidently be called a currant. Russia appears to have been first, its monastic gardeners planting the wild smorodina from about the eleventh century; western Europe followed only in the fifteenth, when Flemish, Rhenish, and Danish gardeners lifted the bushes out of the wood, and the English herbalists of the sixteenth century still treated the plant as a novelty lately fetched from beyond the sea. Even the botanical name is borrowed under a misapprehension: Ribes comes through medieval Latin from the Arabic rībās, which named not a currant but a Persian rhubarb, whose sour stalks the Arab physicians used and for which the acid northern berry was pressed into service as a substitute.
The dried currant travelled first, and it travelled as money. Greek growers had dried grapes since antiquity, and the Corinthia was celebrated for the practice; but it is in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, in the ledgers of the Venetian and Genoese merchants who worked the Aegean, that the small seedless fruit acquires its commercial identity as the raisins de Corauntz, the raisins of Corinth. Venice, holding first the Peloponnesian ports of Corone and Modon and afterwards the Ionian islands of Zante and Cephalonia, made itself the broker of the trade to the whole of northern Europe, and the islands were planted from shore to hilltop with the currant vine. The same vine had already crossed to Sicily, carried west under Byzantine and then Arab rule, where as the passolina it entered the sweet-and-savoury manner of Islamic Mediterranean cookery; and it spread all round the Aegean under the Ottomans, who called it kuş üzümü, the bird grape, and built upon it one of the most distinctive flavour combinations in the world, the triad of rice, pine nut, and currant that defines the palace pilav and the cool oil-cooked vegetables of the Turkish table.
England became the great consumer, and the appetite was startling. English merchants bought at first through Venice; then, from 1581, the Turkey Company and, from 1592, its successor the Levant Company sent English ships directly to Zante, Cephalonia, and Patras, and currants became one of the largest single items of English import, dear enough for the duty upon them to be a standing political grievance and the cause of a long commercial quarrel with the Venetians. The reason lay in the English pudding. Dried currants went by the hundredweight into the boiled plum puddings that became the Christmas pudding, into mincemeat and spotted dick, and into the whole tribe of spiced, enriched, currant-studded buns and 'cakes' that the regions of England each claim as their own: the Chelsea bun and the Bath bun, the Eccles cake and the Banbury cake, the Cornish saffron bun and the Welsh cake. To this day, a British recipe that calls simply for currants means the dried grape.
The Ribes currants made no such voyage, for they cannot: the bush needs a cold winter to break its dormancy and will not fruit in the warm places to which European ships carried everything else. Their spread was therefore a slow domestication across the cool zone rather than a conquest. From the Russian monastery gardens the blackcurrant became the most widely planted berry of the Russian smallholding and the raw material of its whole-fruit varenye. From the gardens of the Low Countries and the Rhineland the redcurrant passed north into Denmark and the German coast, where it became the backbone of the red fruit pudding that Germans call Rote Grütze and Danes rødgrød; west into England, where its pectin made it the jelly fruit of the national table; and south into Burgundy, where an ancient reputation as a medicine and, from 1841, a Dijon liquoriste's method of steeping the whole fresh berry in spirit produced crème de cassis and, in time, the apéritif that bears the name of Canon Kir. In Sweden, Norway, and Finland, where the blackcurrant is native and has always been gathered wild, it became above all a drink, the bottled saft of the winter larder.
Two modern episodes are worth recording because they explain absences. In 1911 the United States prohibited the growing of Ribes outright, since the blackcurrant is an alternate host of white pine blister rust, Cronartium ribicola, and the timber interest was the stronger; the federal ban stood until 1966 and several state bans far longer, with the consequence that the blackcurrant, a childhood taste across the whole of Europe, remains nearly unknown in the American kitchen. And in Greece the currant vine produced a national catastrophe: when French vineyards recovered from phylloxera and ceased buying Greek currants to eke out their wine, the market collapsed, and the resulting ruin of the Peloponnesian countryside in the eighteen-nineties and after drove one of the largest emigrations in Greek history, to the cities of the United States.
Two quite different commodities are traded under the single English word, and the kitchen keeps them firmly apart. The dried currant remains a Greek and Turkish crop above all: the vineyards of the Corinthian Gulf and the Ionian islands, whose Vostizza currants around Aigio carry a protected designation, and the enormous plantings of the İzmir hinterland in Turkey, between them supply most of the world's supply, with smaller quantities of the same Black Corinth vine grown in the irrigated valleys of California, Australia, and South Africa. Its uses are almost entirely inherited: British and Irish baking, where it fills the Christmas pudding, the spiced bun, and the mincemeat jar; Ottoman and Levantine cooking, where it is a savoury ingredient before a sweet one; and Sicilian and Venetian cooking, where it survives in the sweet-and-sour fish and vegetable dishes that the Arab and the medieval Mediterranean left behind.
The Ribes currants are a northern European industry and, unusually amongst fruits, one whose crop is mostly drunk rather than eaten. Poland is by a wide margin the world's largest grower of blackcurrants, followed by Russia, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom, where the greater part of the harvest is contracted to a single cordial. Blackcurrant juice, cordial, purée, and liqueur account for the overwhelming share of production; the fruit is prized commercially for the depth of its anthocyanin colour and for a vitamin C content several times that of an orange, and New Zealand has built a small, highly specialised industry on cultivars unusually rich in both. The redcurrant leads a quieter life as a garden and jelly fruit, its clear scarlet strigs going into the jelly pan, the German and Danish red fruit puddings, the vlaai of the Dutch and Belgian Limburg, and the pastry-cook's glaze; the whitecurrant is a connoisseur's plant, barely commercial.
Around this the fruit keeps a body of regional tradition out of all proportion to its modest tonnage. Crème de cassis and the Kir stand at the head of it, and behind them come redcurrant jelly and Cumberland sauce on the English table, Rote Grütze and rødgrød med fløde across the German and Danish north, blackcurrant varenye in the Russian tea glass, svartvinbärssaft and the hot solbærtoddy of the Nordic winter, rodebessenvlaai in Limburg, and the English summer pudding, which cannot be made without the sharpness the two currants supply. Alongside them run the dried grape's dishes, the Ottoman iç pilav and the oil-cooked dolma, the Palermitan pasta con le sarde, the Venetian sarde in saor, the Greek stafidopsomo, and the whole currant-studded baking of the British Isles. One word, two plants, and a remarkable number of the things people eat when they are being most themselves.
Historical Journey of Currant
The Boreal Forests of Northern Europe & Russia — c. 6000 BCE
The blackcurrant is a plant of cold and damp. Ribes nigrum is a low, sprawling, strong-smelling shrub of wet woodland, river bank, and alder carr, and its wild range runs in a broad belt from northern and central Europe eastward through European Russia into Siberia, reaching the Altai and the fringes of northern Mongolia. Wherever that belt crossed human settlement the fruit was gathered, and currant pips turn up in the northern European archaeological record from the Mesolithic onward. Yet the plant is almost wholly absent from the written record of antiquity, for it does not grow in the Mediterranean lands where the writing was done: neither Theophrastus nor Dioscorides nor Pliny describes anything that can confidently be called a currant, and the blackcurrant is accordingly one of the very few European fruits with no classical past at all. Its most arresting quality is not the berry but the leaf, which is studded with resinous glands and gives off, when crushed underfoot or between the fingers, the pungent, dark, faintly musky scent that carries the entire character of the plant and that no other fruit in Europe possesses. From this immense wild population came both the currant of the Russian garden and the currant of the Nordic bottle.
The Woodlands of Western Europe, from the Pyrenees to the Rhine — c. 5000 BCE
The redcurrant is a different plant with a different homeland. Ribes rubrum grows wild through the cool, damp woods of western Europe, from the northern flanks of the Pyrenees and the mountains of Cantabria across France and the Low Countries to the Rhine, whilst its close northern and montane relatives, R. spicatum and R. petraeum, run on into Scandinavia and the uplands of central Europe. The garden redcurrant of today is a hybrid drawn from all three, and the pale whitecurrant is simply a redcurrant that has lost its pigment. The wild fruit hangs in short, translucent scarlet strigs, sharply acid rather than sweet, and it is exceptionally rich in pectin, a quality that would in time decide almost everything about how the berry came to be used. Like the blackcurrant it passed the classical world by, for the Greek and Latin writers lived where it will not grow, and it left no mark whatever on their languages. It was gathered by the woodland peoples of Atlantic Europe and no more than gathered; the plant that would one day fill the jelly pans of half a continent waited the better part of seven thousand years for a gardener to lift it out of the wood.
Corinth & the Northern Peloponnese, Greece — c. 300 BCE
On the warm, stony slopes above the Gulf of Corinth grows a vine that has nothing whatever to do with the currants of the northern woods, and yet it is the plant that gave them their name. Vitis vinifera 'Black Corinth' bears minute, thin-skinned, intensely sweet black grapes that set no seed, and because a seedless vine can be propagated only by cutting, the plant grown today is in effect the same individual the Corinthians grew: one of the oldest continuously perpetuated cultivars on earth. Dried in the sun it yields not a small raisin but a distinct article of commerce, hard, almost black, sharply flavoured, and small enough to scatter evenly through a dough as no larger dried grape can. The Greeks dried grapes from the earliest antiquity and the Corinthia was celebrated for it; the particular vine is not separately named in the ancient sources, but by the thirteenth century the ledgers of the Venetian and Genoese merchants working the Aegean are full of the raisins de Corauntz, the raisins of Corinth, and it is that phrase, worn down in English mouths, that became the word 'currant'. In its homeland the fruit is the stafida, and its most domestic use is stafidopsomo, the dark, dense, olive-oil currant bread of the harvest kitchen, sweetened with must and scented with orange and cinnamon.
The Corinthian vine crossed the Ionian Sea early, carried west from Greece whilst Sicily was still a Byzantine province, and it was under the Arab emirate that followed that its dried fruit found the cooking it belongs to. Islamic Mediterranean cuisine had a settled taste for the meeting of sweet and savoury, and the cooks of Palermo took to it entirely: dried fruit and sugar, nuts, vinegar, saffron, and cinnamon entered the treatment of fish and vegetables and never left it. Sicilian keeps the small Greek grape carefully distinct from every other dried grape, calling it passolina or passulina, the little dried thing, as against the larger uva passa and the great muscat zibibbo of Pantelleria. The pairing of passolina with toasted pine nuts became the signature of the island's cooking, and it runs through caponata, through sarde a beccafico, and above all through pasta con le sarde, the dish of Palermo itself, in which fresh sardines, wild mountain fennel, saffron, pine nuts, and currants are turned through bucatini and finished with toasted crumbs in place of cheese. Sicilians will tell you that the dish was invented by the cooks of an Arab army short of provisions on the beach at Mazara; it is a legend, but it names the right kitchen.
Veliky Novgorod & the Lands of the Rus' — c. 1100 CE
Russia took the blackcurrant out of the forest and into the garden several centuries before western Europe thought to do so. The wild smorodina grew everywhere along the rivers of the Rus', and the monastic communities of Novgorod and Pskov, whose gardens were the horticultural laboratories of the medieval north, were planting it deliberately by about the eleventh century, so that the blackcurrant has a claim to be the first fruit of the genus Ribes anywhere brought under cultivation. The Russian name is itself a description: smorodina derives from the Old Russian smorod, a strong smell, for the resinous, pungent leaf. Russia found two great uses for it, and keeps both. The leaf goes into the brine crock, laid amongst salted cucumbers, tomatoes, and watermelons for the tannins that keep the flesh firm and for its scent. The fruit goes into varenye, the whole-berry preserve cooked so that the fruit stays intact in a loose, glassy syrup rather than setting to a jam, and blackcurrant varenye is amongst the most prized of all. It is not a spread but a companion to tea: spooned into the glass of strong zavarka, or eaten from a saucer between sips, in the ceremony that has organised Russian hospitality for three hundred years. The blackcurrant remains the most widely planted berry of the Russian household plot.
Venice & the Ionian Islands (Zante and Cephalonia) — c. 1300 CE
Venice made the Corinthian grape into an international commodity. Holding first the Peloponnesian ports of Corone and Modon and afterwards, from the fourteen-eighties, the Ionian islands of Zante and Cephalonia, the Republic controlled both the growing and the shipping of the dried currant, and its merchants carried the raisins de Corauntz to every market in northern Europe. The islands were given over to the vine almost completely, planted from the shoreline to the hilltops, and Zante's name went into English as a synonym for the fruit itself. What Venice bought it also cooked. The city's kitchen has a marked and very old taste for the sweet-and-sour, learnt from its Levantine trade, and its clearest expression is saor: fish fried, then buried for a day or more in a mass of onions slowly stewed in oil and sharpened with vinegar, with pine nuts and currants scattered through. Sarde in saor began as a sailor's preserve, a way of keeping fish edible aboard ship, and rose to become the dish Venetians eat on the water at the Festa del Redentore in July, cold, on the night of the fireworks. The currant survives elsewhere in the Venetian repertoire too, in the Epiphany pinza and in the Easter fugassa, but it is in the saor that it does its finest work.
Limburg, Flanders & the Low Countries — c. 1450 CE
Western Europe's currants came into the garden here, and late. The gardeners of Flanders, the Dutch Limburg, and the neighbouring Rhineland lifted both the redcurrant of the local woods and the blackcurrant of the northern forests out of the wild in the course of the fifteenth century, and the first unambiguous European figures and descriptions of cultivated Ribes are theirs; the English herbalists of the following century were still treating the plant as a novelty lately fetched out of the Low Countries. The Dutch called the redcurrant the aalbes and made it, above all, a fruit for the pastry board. The southern Netherlands and Belgian Limburg possess in the vlaai one of the most distinctive tart traditions in Europe, a wide, flat, shallow open tart built on a soft yeasted dough rather than a shortcrust, baked in every bakery and carried to every funeral, fair, and birthday of the region; and of its many fillings the redcurrant is the sharpest and the most beautiful, the scarlet fruit set beneath a lattice or, in the older Limburg manner, under a cloud of sweetened meringue that tempers the acid. Beside the rodebessenvlaai stand the bessensap of the domestic kitchen and the currant jellies that the Low Countries have made since the fruit first came indoors.
The seedless vine of Corinth spread all round the Aegean under Byzantine and then Ottoman rule, and it is grown to this day in great quantity in the hinterland of İzmir, so that Turkey and Greece between them supply most of the world's dried currants. Turkish calls the fruit kuş üzümü, the bird grape, for its smallness, and treats it first as a savoury ingredient and only afterwards as a sweet one. The palace kitchens of Topkapı built an entire manner of cooking upon it, on the triad of rice, pine nut, and currant seasoned with cinnamon and allspice, which is one of the most recognisable flavour combinations in the world. From it comes iç pilav, the great celebration rice of the Ottoman table, served at weddings, at festivals, and at the breaking of the Ramadan fast; and from it comes the whole zeytinyağlı family, vegetables stuffed with that same filling, cooked slowly in olive oil, and served cool rather than hot, of which biber dolması and soğan dolması are amongst the finest. The currant is not there to sweeten the dish. It punctuates it, giving small bursts of concentrated sweetness against the savour of the onion and the resin of the pine nut, and from the Ottoman table the technique passed into Greek, Balkan, Levantine, and Armenian cooking alike.
England bought its currants at first through Venice, and then decided to fetch them itself. The Turkey Company of 1581 and its successor the Levant Company, chartered in 1592, sent English ships directly to Zante, Cephalonia, and Patras, and within a generation the dried currant had become one of the largest single items of English import, dear enough for the duty upon it to be a standing grievance in Parliament and the cause of a long and bad-tempered commercial quarrel with the Venetians. The appetite behind all this was the English pudding. Currants went by the hundredweight into the boiled plum puddings that hardened into the Christmas pudding, into mincemeat and spotted dick, and into the whole tribe of spiced, enriched, currant-studded buns and 'cakes' that the English regions each claim for their own: the Chelsea bun of the Bun House at Pimlico, coiled in its square tin and lacquered with sugar; the Eccles cake of Lancashire, a fistful of buttered currants in flaky pastry, split and caramelised on top; the Banbury cake, the Bath bun, the Welsh cake, and the saffron bun of Cornwall, in which the world's most expensive spice is set against the cheapest of dried fruits. This is why 'currants' in a British recipe means, without further qualification, the small dried grape of the Aegean.
The Ribes currants reached England as garden plants in the sixteenth century, brought over from the gardens of the Low Countries, and the two colours went two entirely different ways. The redcurrant's exceptional pectin and acid mean that it sets, with nothing but sugar, into a jelly of great clarity and firmness, and redcurrant jelly became the standing English accompaniment to lamb, mutton, venison, and game, and the foundation of Cumberland sauce, the cold sauce of jelly, port, shredded orange and lemon zest, mustard, and ginger that is served with cold game, raised pies, and ham. The blackcurrant, too musky and tannic for the fruit bowl, became the fruit of the jam pot, the fool, the pie, and above all the cordial. Both do essential work in the summer pudding, the great thrifty English dish of soft fruit pressed into a bread-lined basin, where the currants supply the sharpness and the deep staining colour that raspberries and strawberries alone cannot give. The blackcurrant's modern British career was decided by war: a syrup developed at the Long Ashton Research Station near Bristol in the nineteen-thirties was issued free to young children through the Second World War, when citrus could not be imported, and blackcurrant has stood for fruitiness in British drinks, sweets, and medicines ever since.
Hamburg, Schleswig-Holstein & the Danish Isles — c. 1650 CE
From the gardens of the Low Countries and the Rhineland the currant travelled north and east into the German coastlands and across into Denmark, where it found the climate that suits it best and a kitchen ready for it. German fixed the fruit to the church calendar in its very name: the Johannisbeere, the berry of St John, which ripens about the twenty-fourth of June, whilst Danish and Norwegian keep the older ribs for the red and solbær, the sun berry, for the black. The dish that resulted is one of the defining puddings of northern Europe. Rote Grütze in German and rødgrød in Danish means, quite literally, red groats, for the mixture of red summer fruit was originally thickened with buckwheat or barley meal before starch replaced it; the redcurrant is its backbone, giving the acidity and the pectin that hold the whole together, with raspberries, sour cherries, and strawberries filling it out. It is served cool with cold cream poured over, or with milk or vanilla sauce, and in Denmark the full phrase rødgrød med fløde has become the national test of pronunciation, the sentence Danes hand to foreigners in the certainty that it cannot be said. Beside it stands the Johannisbeerkuchen of the German coffee table, the currants baked on a sheet under a high cap of meringue.
The blackcurrant is native across Fennoscandia and was gathered from the wild there for millennia before anyone planted it, and the Nordic countries put it to a use of their own. The Swedish name records an early one: vinbär, the wine berry, for the country wine once made from it, with svarta and röda distinguishing black from red. Under the allemansrätt, the ancient right of public access that permits anyone to pick wild berries on any land, the late-summer bärplockning remains a national habit rather than a rural one, and the blackcurrant is amongst its rewards. What the Nordic kitchen makes of the fruit is not a pudding but a drink. Saft, the sweetened fruit concentrate boiled and bottled in late summer and kept through the winter, is the staple of the domestic larder: svartvinbärssaft in Sweden and solbærsaft in Norway are diluted with cold water in the summer and drunk hot in the dark of the year, and the hot solbærtoddy, spiced or laced or plain, is what a Norwegian is given for a cold and what waits in a thermos at the end of a winter walk. Beside the saft stand the Finnish herukkakiisseli, the berry pudding thickened with potato flour, and the currant jellies that accompany the game and the reindeer of the northern table.
Burgundy took the garden blackcurrant of the northern Europeans and made of it a liqueur of world reputation. The cassis had been grown on the Côte-d'Or since the sixteenth century, valued at first as a medicine rather than a food; an anonymous treatise of 1712 credited its leaf and fruit with curing very nearly everything, and the resulting enthusiasm filled the poorer slopes and the ground between the vines with bushes. In 1841 a Dijon liquoriste, Auguste-Denis Lagoute, found the method that made the fruit famous. Rather than distilling it, he steeped whole fresh berries in alcohol and sweetened the resulting infusion heavily, so that the liqueur kept the raw fruit's colour and its scent entire; crème de cassis de Dijon is a maceration to this day, never a distillate, and its density of sugar and fruit is what allows so small a measure to colour and flavour a whole glass. Its supreme use is an apéritif of the plainest possible construction: a little cassis poured into a glass of the sharp, lean local white wine made from the Aligoté grape. The drink was made famous after the Second World War by Canon Félix Kir, priest, Resistance figure, and mayor of Dijon, who poured it at every civic reception of his long tenure and gave it his name.
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