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Currant cake question
On Wed, 04 Feb 2004 08:55:55 +0200
Davida Chazan - The Chocolate Lady > wrote: > NOTE: My Correct Address is in my signature (just remove the spaces). > On Tue, 03 Feb 2004 21:41:15 GMT, (Seppo > Sipil=E4) wrote: >=20 > >Hi all, I'm translating Roald Dahl's memoirs and got stuck with > >"currant cake". As "currant" has two meanings (berries and raisins), > >I don't know which one is correct. > > > >He's telling about his childhood in an English boarding school in the > >1920's (St Peter's in Weston-super-Mare), and currant cake is > >something that mothers would send in the mail to their sons. So... > >berries or "raisins of Corinth"? >=20 > I'd go with the raisins, since it makes sense that they would be in a > cake that needed to travel well. =20 The currants i know and love are Ribes rubrum. Sometimes R. floridum. They come from a somewhat woody bush and are a relative of gooseberries. There's a patch of them next to back door of the house i grew up in. They are native to northern Europe and Scandinavia.=20 Apparently, boxes of 'dried currants' are not currants at all. They are dried Zante grapes, aka Champagne grapes, aka Zante currants. I haven't been able to nail down the scientific name precisely, but all signs point to genus Vitis, hailing originally from central asia.=20 Now, here's the positively enraging part.=20 The word "currant" is derived from the name Corinth. The currants of the Ribes genus are *named *after Zante grapes.=20 To make things nice and confusing, there seem to be plenty of recipes that call for red or black fresh currants, and plenty of recipes that call for boxes of dried currants. I don't have the time or inclination to seek out the authenticity of either.=20 Given the propensity for dried fruits and berries in the puddings of the british isles, it seems somewhat more likely that Roald Dahl is referring to the dried corinthian product. On the other hand, there's history telling us that the cuisine of the british isles changed greatly with the industrial revolution - populations shifted from the countryside to the cities, and the availability of for example fresh herbs in the cities wasn't anywhere near what it was on the countryside, and thus did the britons descend into blandness. I have no idea whether Ribes berries were cultivated in wales before or during that period, though they certainly would have flourished had anyone tried. And I'm hardly a nutritional anthropologist.=20 My money is still on the dried product. Fresh currants don't keep for more than a few days so they are essentially the domain of people who are interested in cultivating and picking them. But the whole thing is worse than nailing down exactly what 'pimento' is supposed to mean. And with that, I'm gonna go smear some home made R. rubrum jelly on some toast. |
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