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Currants, to Bottle, for Tarts in Winter
Ascertain that the fruit has been gathered when it was quite dry, or it will not keep. Pick it and put it into clean, wide-mouthed, dry bottles. A few strawberries or raspberries may be added or not. Cover the fruit with water. Soak some bladder in water, tie a piece firmly over the top of each bottle, and wrap a little hay round the bottles; then put them into a pan of cold water, and let them stand upright without touching one another; the water should reach nearly to the necks of the bottles. Put the pan on the fire, and when the water is on the point of boiling, draw it to one side, and let it remain for half an hour. The bottles should not be taken out of the water until it is nearly cold. Tie strong paper over each of the bottles, and keep them in a bottle-rack in a cool, dry place, with the necks downwards. The fruit will keep good for years. The water must not boil. Shake the fruit well down, or the bottles will not be more than half full.
This is a Victorian water-bath bottling method, and its whole logic rests on a closure and a process that no current preserving authority accepts. The notes below explain what the instructions assumed and where the method fails.
- The water is deliberately never boiledThe recipe insists the pan be drawn off the fire at the point of boiling and held for half an hour, and repeats that the water must not boil; it gives no reason for this. That leaves an under-boiling process of unmeasured temperature, which is not a validated heat treatment for anything.
- Bladder and paper are not a sealA piece of soaked bladder shrinks tight as it dries and a sheet of strong paper keeps dust off, but neither forms the vacuum-dependent, airtight closure that makes modern bottling safe. Air and microorganisms move back in as the jar cools and as the bladder ages.
- Stored neck downwardsThe recipe gives no reason for this; inverting the bottles may have acted as a check on the closure, since liquid weeping past the bladder would show a failure. It also means the pack sits permanently against a porous organic membrane, which is the opposite of what a preserving seal should do.
- Acidity is not a licenceCurrants are genuinely high in acid, which is why this method survived as long as it did and why Clostridium botulinum is not the leading concern here. Yeasts, moulds and fermentation are, and mould growth in bottled fruit can produce mycotoxins as well as simply ruining the jar.
- "Will keep good for years"That is the book's own claim, and it is not evidence that the process is reliable; any bottle that had blown, clouded or grown a bloom would have had to be thrown out.
- The hay and the standing waterHay round the bottles and cold water at the start are there to prevent thermal shock and cracking in thin nineteenth-century glass. They tell you nothing about whether the fruit inside reached a safe or stable state.
- If you want bottled currantsUse a current tested recipe from a preserving authority, with jars, lids and a stated process time. Do not adapt the method above.
Bottling fruit in water for winter tarts was one of the great domestic economies of the English kitchen garden: red and black currants ripen in a short summer glut, and a household with bushes had far more than it could eat fresh. The technique belongs to the nineteenth-century tradition of preserving by heat, here in a distinctly cottage form -- the sealing material is a soaked bladder, the same cheap butcher's byproduct used to cover jam pots and pickle jars before commercial parchment and rubber rings were common. The insistence that the fruit be gathered dry, that the water must not boil, and that the bottles stand neck downwards is characteristic of that system. Water-packed fruit of this kind was not a dessert in itself but raw material, tipped into a pie dish with sugar in February when nothing was in season.