Red Currants

I have a particular fondness for red currants. My relationship with them traces back to a particular time and place.  The year was 1992. The place: Besançon, Eastern part of France.

I was staying with a host family for 3 weeks while learning French with other high schoolers who were staying with their respective host families. We would meet for classes during the day, but the rest of the time we were on our own, or with the families that did not speak much English. In my case, the English part of it was virtually nil.

On the first Friday that I was with Catherine, my French host mother, we had a conversation over dinner. My French was still poor, and I could barely tell what we were talking about. After a few minutes of trying to understand, I got the sense that she was taking me somewhere with her young son the following day. That was all I could manage.

And I was right. We did go somewhere. It turned out to be out in the country, to her friends' house with a large garden. The word that kept coming up in the car (and I wished I had a dictionary with me) was groseilles. It usually followed with confiture, another word I did not know at that time.

Soon enough, I was standing in the middle of a field of groseilles: red currants. They were the most beautiful little jewel - like berries I had ever seen (rather eye-opening for a 17 year old). Catherine taught me how to pick them so that they would not be bruised. We picked from the stem, allowing the berry clusters to come off together. It didn't take long for us to have a bucket full of groseilles before we headed home to turn them into confiture: red currant jelly!

For the next couple of weeks with Catherine, I would have the freshest baguette from the neighborhood bakery with the groseilles confiture for breakfast. I still think about that day today whenever I see red currants at a market, or leaping out of our neighbor's fence as we are experiencing right now! I also allow myself to purchase a jar of red current jam whenever I see one because eating it with a fresh loaf of baguette transports me back to 1992 to the moment of clarity and introduction to these beautiful currants.