Did You Know?
Why American candy is grape and European candy is blackcurrant
The answer involves a fungus, the lumber industry, and a law from 1911.
If you have ever been handed a packet of sweets in France or England, you will have noticed something. There is a flavour in there that does not exist at home. It is dark and slightly tart and faintly medicinal in a way that is somehow pleasant. In France it is called cassis. In England they will tell you it is blackcurrant and then look at you strangely when you say you have never had it.
Meanwhile, every purple thing in an American shop is grape.
This is not a coincidence of taste. It is the result of a federal ban.
The fungus
In the early 1900s, foresters in the northeastern United States noticed white pine trees dying. The cause was a fungus, Cronartium ribicola, white pine blister rust, which had arrived from Europe on imported seedlings. It kills a pine slowly, raising cankers along the branches until the needles go rust-coloured and the tree gives up.
The fungus has an unusual habit. It cannot get from one pine to another directly. It needs a second, entirely different plant to complete its life cycle, and the plants it uses are Ribes — currants and gooseberries. Blackcurrant among them.
At the time, white pine was one of the most valuable things in the country. It framed American houses. The industry was worth up to a billion dollars, which in 1911 was an almost unimaginable sum. And here was a bush, grown mostly by immigrant farmers for jam and cordial, sitting in the middle of the fungus's supply chain.
The bush lost.
The ban
In 1911 the federal government prohibited the cultivation, sale and transport of blackcurrants. Then it went further. Government programmes set out to destroy the plants that already existed, and crews were sent out with backpacks of chemical spray to eradicate Ribes wherever it grew. Field after field.
It worked, more or less. But it did something else at the same time, and this is the part that interests me.
Before the ban, blackcurrant was not exotic in America. English settlers had brought it to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1629. By the late nineteenth century something like 7,400 acres were given over to currants and gooseberries, much of it in New York State. People grew it, cooked with it, made cordial out of it, and knew what it tasted like.
Two generations later, nobody did.
One historian of the period put it more precisely than I could: as field after field was destroyed, the American consumer's memory of the fruit was erased along with it.
What filled the gap
Here is where the timing turns cruel.
The blackcurrant ban landed at exactly the moment the American confectionery industry was working out what it was going to taste like. Early sweets and sodas were flavoured with whatever was abundant and cheap, and what was abundant was citrus from the new orchards of Florida and California, and grape from the Concord vineyards of the northeast.
So those became the standard. Not because anyone chose them over blackcurrant, but because blackcurrant was not on the table to be chosen. A child growing up in 1930s America had never tasted it and never would. Purple, in the American imagination, became grape, and it has stayed grape ever since.
Across the Atlantic nothing of the kind happened. Blackcurrant kept its place, in cordials and sweets and jam. Ribena was launched in Britain in the 1930s and handed to schoolchildren during the war as a source of vitamin C. In France the berry went into crème de cassis, the liqueur that turns champagne purple in a kir royale, and the leaf stayed where it had always been, on the kitchen shelf.
Today Europe produces around 99 percent of the world's currants.
The ban ends, quietly
The federal prohibition was lifted in 1966. By then, resistant pine varieties had been bred and the science had moved on — modern work suggests currants were a less significant vector than the foresters of 1911 believed.
But a federal law is one thing and fifty state laws are another. Many states kept their own bans for decades. New York, which had grown more blackcurrant than anywhere else in the country, did not overturn its prohibition until 2003.
And by then the real damage was done, because it was never really about the law. You can legalise a fruit. You cannot legislate a country back into wanting something it has forgotten. There was no demand, because there was nobody left who remembered.
What you have been missing
The berry is worth finding. It is darker and more complicated than grape, with an edge to it that grape does not have.
But the part I would point you to is the leaf, which almost nobody outside Europe has ever heard of, and which never had a candy career to lose.
Turn a blackcurrant leaf over and the underside is dotted with tiny yellow glands. Crush one and the whole hedge smells of it, musky and green and faintly of the fruit. In France those leaves have been dried and steeped for centuries — kept for joint comfort, and for jambes lourdes, heavy legs, which is a phrase English does not have because English has not been paying attention.
It is not a discovery. It is not a superfood. It is simply a common household thing in one country that happens to be unknown in another, for reasons that had nothing to do with how it tastes or what it does, and everything to do with a fungus and a lumber lobby and a law passed the year before the Titanic sailed.
You can just drink it. That is the whole point.
La Vie Tea's blackcurrant leaf is picked once a year from the hedge line of our garden in the Dordogne, dried whole, and sold one plant to a pouch.
Sources and further reading
- Library of Congress, America's Blackcurrant Ban (In Custodia Legis, 2022)
- Warren V. Benedict, History of White Pine Blister Rust Control: A Personal Account (USDA Forest Service, 1981)
Traditional uses described here are for interest and are not medical advice. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
