Last post of the year. Three months and writing. And actually a whole lot of blog reading too. My ideas for writing are increasing all the time. But in the meantime, there’s a series to finish: and blackcurrants to contemplate.
Blackcurrants. Ribena. Fruit pastilles. Jam. For me, they are the flavour of childhood: the one that you acquire as soon as you try the original squash (aka juice, cordial…as you like it). The tartness, the colour, the intensity. It’s all there.
Blackcurrant and I go back a long way, back to the days of Ribena in glass bottles. One of my more memorable early years moments was dropping a bottle of Ribena on the kitchen floor. Work out how to clean THAT one up, with no doubt a crying toddler in tow…Mental note to ask my mum how she did do that.
For any packet of sweets, really what I wanted was the blackcurrant ones. The others, yes, I would eat them, but the blackcurrant ones were the prizes in the pack.
Consider that moment as someone take the fruit pastille in the packet, and tears back the paper for you to take yours. If the next one was black, you were sorted. No wonder someone marketed a packet where EVERY one was blackcurrant. It’s the same principal as selling large individual chocolates from Quality Street.
Blackcurrant also seems synonymous with solving colds. Maybe it’s because blackcurrant throat sweets are particularly yummy. I remember the days of cherry flavoured Actifed cough syrup, and later how they changed the recipe to stop people drinking it and becoming addicted to it. Just imagine if they had made it blackcurrant in the first place. No hope of staying off it.
Later, in my main jam making phase, I made blackcurrant jam. It went well. And the colour when stirring it…I love the colours from fruit as you make jam, but blackcurrant is the darkest, glossiest. You’re not quite the alchemist, but you feel capable of concocting pretty much anything when you see it.
The last time I made it, sadly I didn’t really let it settle before turning it into jars. Result: blackcurrants in nicely coloured liquid sugar suspension. I am of course eating it up, but it’s not quite the finished product I was after.
Blackcurrants fill a certain space in the memory for different people. For my mother in law, it’s a memory of her grandmother’s jam, the one she didn’t have at home. For me, it’s the perfect jam from my first time in Poland, eaten day after day at breakfast and supper.
I’m sure I have used blackcurrants in other settings. A handful, at least, in a mixed berry summer pudding I made last year. Blackcurrant in particular seeps through the bread well, the acidity offset by other sweeter berries. It made for a close contender for the perfect pudding, I know.
Whatever your own food loves, your food memories…they are part of who you are. What you cook. What you pick from a menu. These ingredients shape how we experience others, how we remember them. And I wouldn’t be without them.