Rachel's recipes: Berry berry delicious redcurrants and a posh crumble

This week I was super excited to see my favorite berries of the season on sale in Matache – redcurrants or “coacaze rosii”. Memories flooded back of last year's “mouli marathon” where I made seedless redcurrant jam using David Lebovitz’ recipe as a guide. I briefly cooked the fruit and made a puree by passing them through a hand food mill. I was left with an iridescent red gloop to be made into jam and a large pile of pips and pulp.

Having read up on the power of fruit acids to cleanse and renew skin, I resourcefully decided to use the seedy leftovers as a bath time scrub. As with many things in life, sometimes the idea and the execution are very different things. For those of you who want to try this at home, I can say that the exfoliating sensation and the kind of fruity fresh smell were good. Not so good, however, was dying my skin bright red. Still the main event, the jam, was sensational. Tired from fruit pureeing travails, I left the sugar to macerate in the redcurrant gloop overnight. Come morning, I witnessed a piece of kitchen alchemy – the super pectin charged berries had jelly-fied overnight merely by macerating in the sugar. It was tempting to just jar it as “fresh jam” and maybe I will do that this weekend, but at time I decided to press on, be a purist and not embellish what is after all the queen of jams. Essentially boil 1 quantity by weight redcurrant puree with 1 quantity sugar or slightly less. The quantities I use are 1kg fruit pulp to 800g sugar. Boil until setting point is reached (jam stiffens and wrinkles on a frozen plate). My jam reached setting point in approximately 10 minutes. Pot while hot into sterilized hot jars. For the full recipe and lots of French bucolic charm photos that make you want to cook forever in a French village check out this site. This year I am straying from the pure redcurrant path and making redcurrant and strawberry. The flavors work well together and the redcurrants help their pectin deficient cousins along . I spike it with lime zest just before potting to add a bit of zing and interest. One of my favorite frangipane tarts is made with redcurrants. Make the tart as in the cherry and pecan frangipane tart recipe (use almonds and almond essence for the classic frangipane tart) and drop the berries onto the frangipane mix. A truly gorgeous combination of sharp against sweet. And its worth mentioning that redcurrants are massively high in vitamin C with a fairly high fiber content too, so munch on! For a simple dessert that is always wonderful, a crumble is hard to beat. Serve with custard or thick yoghurt and you have three taste and texture sensations all together : soft pulpy fruit, crunchy crunchy crumble and smooth gloopy smooth – YUM. In recent years the humble crumble has become fashionable.