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Carrot Sweetmeats
Boil small fine-grained carrots in water till tender; peel and grate, add sugar, slips of citron, spices if preferred, and wine; simmer slowly together and put away in jars. Very wholesome for children and very much liked. The juice from any canned fruit sold would take the place of the simple wine used here the alcoholic mixtures sold in America being utterly unfit for household consumption.-Mrs. S. Williston, Heidelberg, Germany.
This is a contributed note rather than a worked recipe: no quantities, no cooking times, no method for sealing or storing. The gaps matter here because the thing being stored is a low-acid vegetable.
- Why this one failsCarrots are a low-acid food, pH around 6. A cooked carrot conserve ladled into jars and "put away" with no measured acid, no measured sugar concentration and no heat processing is exactly the environment in which Clostridium botulinum spores survive and grow. The spores are not destroyed by simmering, and nothing in the recipe brings the jars near the temperatures that would kill them.
- The sugar is unmeasuredSugar preserves by binding water, but only above roughly 65 percent soluble solids sustained throughout the batch. "Add sugar" gives no way to know whether the finished conserve is anywhere near that, and grated carrot carries a great deal of water with it.
- The wine does nothingThe wine does little -- A splash of table wine in a simmered preserve contributes very little acid to the batch, and most of the alcohol cooks off. The author's suggested substitute, canned fruit juice, offers no more. Neither should be relied on as a preservative.
- If you want carrot conserveUse a current tested preserving recipe with stated sugar weights, added acid and a processing time. That is the whole of the advice here.
- CitronMost likely candied citron peel, sold in slabs and cut into slips, rather than the fresh fruit or the American citron melon that also turns up in nineteenth-century preserving recipes. Candied citron appears throughout nineteenth-century preserve and cake recipes and is still sold at holiday baking counters.
- "Small fine-grained carrots"The instruction appears to be about texture rather than size for its own sake. Older carrot varieties were more prone to a woody, fibrous core that grated into strings, while young roots cooked down smooth. Modern supermarket carrots are generally bred for tenderness, and the distinction matters less.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, compiled in Ohio in the 1870s and reissued repeatedly through the 1880s, grew out of a compilation associated with the First Congregational Church of Marysville, Ohio, and drew its contributions from a wide network of church-connected women, some of them writing from abroad, which is how a note from Heidelberg comes to sit in an American community cookbook. Sweetened carrot preserves belong to a long European tradition of treating the root as a fruit: carrots are sweet for a vegetable, and in periods when cane sugar was dear they were used to stretch or replace it in puddings, tarts and conserves, a habit that is well documented in Britain during the Second World War. The contributor's parting shot at "the alcoholic mixtures sold in America being utterly unfit for household consumption" is worth noting on its own account. It reflects both the temperance sympathies common to the book's contributors and a genuine grievance of the era, when American wine was often said to be adulterated and no federal food purity law existed until 1906.