Currant cake question

Currants of Corinth.

But our Sante Currants from California are very good too and even smaller= =2E

Trader Joe's carries many varieties, some even unsulfured and BIO.

--=20 Grue$$e.

C=3D=A6-)=A7 H. W. Hans Kuntze, CMC, S.g.K. (_o_) " Strive for excellence in your life & reject being a doormat to others. = Serve God. "

Really. The currants i used to help my mother make into jelly came off a bush in the back yard rather than a vine, and didn't resemble grapes at all. We grew and harvested both so I'm pretty sure about this.

Huh? The man is doing a translation. Isn't "John recieved a small seedless grape of the Mediterranean region cake from his mother" rather too stilted?

gloria p

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.

in traditional English fruit cakes currants, sultanas and raisins are the three dried fruits used, so which ever you chose would be ok.i personally do not like currants so i tend to use more sultanas.

Heh, that sounds like something from Monty Python. Luckily we have a perfectly good word for it in Finnish: "korintti". Apart from a dried very small Mediterranean grape it also refers to the place where it came from (or at least got its name from), Corinth, in which case it's spelled with a capital K).

"Corinth cake" was actually my first guess too, I just began to doubt myself later on because I'm no expert on British cuisine. Anyway, thanks to everyone for the enlightening answers :)

S.

(Please NOTE: My correct e-mail address is in my Signature) On Wed, 4 Feb 2004 03:08:33 -0700, during the rec.food.baking Community News Flash Eric Jorgensen reported:

While this was fascinating (it really, really was, actually), let's not forget that the person just needed to know what is close for him to use when translating the word.

(I was speaking as a writer, not a baker in this sense!)

Oh, I agree. I sorta hoped to address that, but without knowing what language it's being translated into (I'm presuming it was originally written in english) it's tough to make a specific suggestion, because even nouns vary in their meaning from culture to culture and from era to era.

Translators ultimately end up making judgment calls. Sometimes they're weird.

Example: at the beginning of a particular japanese movie, if you watch the original subtitled japanese release from the early

It turned out that when the movie was originally made,'red benny' was common slang for a methamphetamine pill. But in 2000, the common slang for a methamphetamine in japan was 'peanut'. Somehow the translators decided that what they were translating was "popular street name for speed" rather than "The name of Kaneida's biker gang, in order for us to properly foreshadow the ensuing chase scene."

So, anyway, now that the etymology in english is clear, one can then compare that to the etymology in the target language, whatever that may be. Like i said, "pimento" is allspice berries in some cases, bell peppers in others, occasionally black pepper, and additionally whatever that is they stuff in olives and make pimento spread out of, which doesn't look or taste like like any of the above to me. We have the spanish to thank for that conundrum.

Didn't have the heart to snip any of this. I like you! You should visit a usenet writing group. Mind you, the one I'm on is more about politics and philosophy and fighting (misc.writing), but still...

(... it was a fun read.)