I celebrated my high school graduation clinking a flute of kir royale: crème de cassis topped with champagne— dark, sweet, a warm plum purple color that felt like a special celebration. I grew up in Europe, where black currant is a flavor as ordinary as grape is in the United States, and I’ve always enjoyed that deep, sweet, sour, slightly bitter, and earthy flavor. Black currant has a complexity to it, a wildness that changes depending on what you do with it. In a kir royale, it is festive and dark. In a jam, it is rich and almost savory. It is a perfect accompaniment to game meat.

Currants are less known in North America because they were outlawed for many years. English settlers introduced and cultivated the European black currant (Ribes nigrum), but in the 1900s, people discovered that a fungal disease, white pine blister rust, also came across with the imported currant seedlings. Cultivated black currants were spreading the disease, threatening white pine trees and the American timber industry.

From 1911–1966, the federal government banned the cultivation, sale, and transport of black currants. By then, two or three generations of Americans had grown up without encountering the flavor. Europeans, whose food culture had faced no such ban, had woven black currant into everything from cordials to candy in the intervening decades. In Britain, where black currant juice became a wartime vitamin C supplement after German blockades cut off citrus imports, the berry became a cultural staple.

In Alaska, many types of currants grow wild and have been enjoyed by Alaska Native peoples and foragers, despite the ban on cultivated varieties. Wild black currants (Ribes hudsonianum) grow in the damp forest and have white flowers and smooth, black berries.

Also common in interior Alaska are their tart-tasting cousins, red currants (Ribes triste), that look very similar except that they have red-green flowers and bright-red berries. In coastal Alaska, you can also find the trailing black currant (Ribes laxiflorum), which has hairy berries with a bluish tint, the swamp gooseberry (Ribes lacustre), and stink currants (Ribes bracteosum), also known as gray or skunk currants.

When foraging for wild berries, make sure you feel confident about your plant identification, or go with someone who does. Several plants look like currants, including the poisonous baneberry (Actaea rubra).

Editors’ note: We’d be remiss not to raise our kir royales in a congratulatory toast to Kristin Link for having published her debut book!