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Currants, to Keep, for Tarts
Gather the fruit when it is quite dry and not over-ripe, pick it from the stalks, and put it into a large dry earthen jar, with a quarter of a pound of moist sugar to each pound of fruit. Put it in a good oven and bake it for twenty minutes. Warm some preserving jars, be sure that they are quite dry, and fill them with the fruit. Tie a bladder over them immediately, and store them in a dry place. They will keep good through the winter if they are not opened, but they require to be used when the cover has once been removed. Probable cost of currants, 4d. to 6d. per quart.
This is an oven-canning method with a bladder seal, and it belongs to a period before anyone understood what actually keeps a sealed jar sterile. The notes below explain the terms and why the preservation will not hold up.
- Oven canning is the core problemDry heat in an oven heats glass and fruit unevenly and slowly, and the twenty minutes given here is measured on the jar of fruit in the oven, not on the sealed container. Nothing in the method guarantees the contents reach or hold a temperature that destroys yeasts and moulds, and no oven temperature is specified at all.
- The seal is not a sealA bladder, a cleaned animal bladder tied over the jar mouth and left to shrink tight as it dries, makes a cover, not a vacuum. It is not reliably airtight, it is not sterile, and it cannot be verified. Modern preserving depends on a measurable vacuum seal formed in a boiling-water bath, and there is no equivalent here.
- Hot glass in a dry ovenHot fruit into warmed glass — The instruction to warm the preserving jars before filling them with the hot fruit is sound thinking about thermal shock. The recipe does not say how the jars are to be warmed; note that ordinary modern preserving jars are not designed for dry oven heat and can fracture, sometimes after they come out.
- The book's own admission"They require to be used when the cover has once been removed" tells you the author knew the pack was fragile. A properly processed jar of currants is stable until opened and then behaves like any other opened preserve; this one was expected to spoil quickly and probably did.
- "Moist sugar"Unrefined or partly refined sugar, damp and pale brown, roughly what we would call light brown sugar. At a quarter pound to the pound of fruit it is a light sweetening, well below the sugar concentration that makes a jam self-preserving — this is stored fruit, not a preserve.
- The costingFourpence to sixpence a quart reflects a Victorian household economy in which currants were a cheap garden or market glut and the point was getting them through to winter without waste. The price note is a fossil of the book's original readership, not a guide to anything now.
- If you want currants for winter tartsFollow a current tested recipe for water-bath canning or simply freeze the picked fruit on trays and bag it. Do not adapt the method above.
Currants — red, white and black — were long grown in the English kitchen garden, valued because they crop heavily, ripen in a short glut, and are acid enough to set well in tarts and jellies. The problem the recipe addresses is entirely seasonal: a household with bushes had more fruit in July than it could eat, and none at all in January, when a currant tart was exactly the kind of thing a cook wanted to produce. Sealing with a bladder was a common domestic answer, used for potted meats and fruit alike; parchment, waxed paper and later metal-lidded jars displaced it as commercial glass became cheaper over the nineteenth century. That transition is the background to the entry's hedged promise — good through the winter, but only if the jar is never opened.