Origins
The word "currant" is a striking example of how a place name can be so thoroughly absorbed into everyday language that its geographical origin becomes invisible. The small dried fruits sold as "currants" in grocery stores worldwide owe their name to Corinth (Greek: Κόρινθος, Kórinthos), the ancient and medieval Greek city that was once the principal export center for the small, seedless grapes from which they are made.
The chain of transmission runs from the Anglo-Norman phrase "raisins de Corauntz" (raisins of Corinth), attested in the fourteenth century, through the Middle English shortening "coraunts" to the modern English "currants." The phonological evolution is straightforward: the place name was progressively reduced and anglicized, losing its association with Corinth in the process. By the fifteenth century, most English speakers using the word would not have recognized it as a place name at all.
The "currant" of commerce — the small, dark, intensely flavored dried grape — is made from the Black Corinth grape (Vitis vinifera cultivar 'Zante Currant'), also known as the Zante currant after the Ionian island of Zakynthos (Italian: Zante), which became a major production center. These tiny grapes have been cultivated in Greece since antiquity and were a significant export commodity throughout the medieval and early modern periods. They are distinct from raisins (dried from larger grape varieties) and sultanas (dried from white seedless grapes), though all three are dried grapes.
Development
The naming situation becomes more complex with the genus Ribes — the blackcurrant, redcurrant, and whitecurrant bushes. These fruits are entirely unrelated to dried grapes, belonging to the family Grossulariaceae rather than Vitaceae. They received the name "currant" in the sixteenth century simply because their small, clustered berries resembled the dried Corinthian grapes. This is a classic case of what linguists call "semantic transfer by analogy": the name of one thing being applied to another based on perceived physical similarity, regardless of actual botanical relationship.
The confusion has persisted for centuries and continues to trip up cooks and writers. When a British recipe calls for "currants," it may mean either the dried grape (in traditional baking contexts like Christmas pudding, Eccles cakes, or spotted dick) or the fresh berry (in jams, sauces, or drinks like the French cassis, made from blackcurrants). American English adds another layer of complexity: Ribes currants were effectively banned in the United States for much of the twentieth century because they are an alternate host for white pine blister rust, a devastating disease of American timber trees. Consequently, many Americans know "currants" only as the dried grape variety used in baking.
The Corinthian dried grape trade has a rich and sometimes turbulent history. In the nineteenth century, currant exports were so economically important to Greece that fluctuations in the currant market could cause political upheaval. The "currant crisis" of the 1890s, when overproduction collapsed prices, contributed to Greece's national bankruptcy of 1893. The British government's protective tariffs on currant imports were a recurring point of diplomatic friction between the two countries.
Later History
Etymologically, "currant" joins a large family of English food words derived from Mediterranean place names: "peach" from Persia, "tangerine" from Tangier, "damson" from Damascus, "shallot" from Ashkelon, "sardine" from Sardinia. These words form a lexical atlas of ancient and medieval trade, preserving in the daily language of cooking and eating the memory of the commercial networks that shaped European cuisine.
The word's dual reference — to dried grapes and to fresh berries of an entirely different plant — makes it one of the more confusing terms in the culinary lexicon. But this confusion itself is etymologically instructive: it shows how names, once detached from their origins, become free to attach to new referents based on superficial similarity, creating the kind of overlapping, contradictory naming that makes natural languages so different from designed taxonomies.