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Fruit, to Bottle
Currants, gooseberries, and other fruit may be thus preserved. After freeing them from stalks, put them into wide-mouthed glass bottles, and shake them that the bottles may be full; place the receptacles, lightly corked, into a nearly cold oven for four or five hours. When the fruit shrivels, remove it from the oven, and cork the bottles tightly and quickly, tying down securely with leather. Keep in a dry place.
This is a Victorian dry-oven bottling method, and it is the one class of old recipe that modern practice has abandoned outright. The points below explain what the instructions leave out and why that matters.
- No temperature is given at all"a nearly cold oven for four or five hours" is an undefined instruction, and a falling one: the heat drops throughout. Nothing in the method guarantees the fruit, the glass or the air in the bottle ever reaches a temperature that reliably destroys yeasts, moulds and heat-resistant bacterial spores, and no thermometer is used to check.
- The seal is not a sealA cork pushed in after heating and tied down with leather is permeable and it is not sterile. Modern preserving relies on a vacuum formed as sealed jars cool, with a lid that can be checked for a positive seal. Cork and leather give neither the vacuum nor the check.
- "Other fruit" is where it becomes dangerous"Other fruit" is the loosest part of the instruction -- currants and gooseberries are strongly acidic. Applied to low-acid produce, the same procedure creates the warm, sealed, oxygen-poor conditions in which Clostridium botulinum spores can germinate and produce toxin. Botulinum toxin gives no warning in smell, taste or appearance.
- Dry-packed bottles crowded with fruitThe fruit is packed with no syrup or water and the bottle is shaken full, so heat has to travel through a dense mass of berries by conduction alone. The centre of a filled bottle lags behind the oven, and in a cooling oven it may never catch up.
- Glass in a direct ovenOrdinary bottle glass is not oven glass. Uneven radiant heat invites thermal shock and cracking, which is a further route for spoilage organisms as well as a mess.
- What the shrivelling actually tells youThe fruit collapsing is a sign that water has been driven off and the skins have burst, not a sign that the contents are sterile. It is a visual cue standing in for the measurement the method has no way of taking.
- If you want bottled currants or gooseberriesUse a current, tested water-bath canning recipe with specified jar sizes, headspace, processing times and altitude adjustments, or simply freeze the fruit, which suits currants and gooseberries very well.
Bottling by oven heat belongs to the stretch between Nicolas Appert's early nineteenth-century demonstration that heated, sealed food keeps, and the household spread of screw-band and clamp-top preserving jars over the course of the century. Cooks understood the principle -- heat the fruit, close the vessel, keep out air -- but had no oven thermometer and no reliable lid. The choice of currants and gooseberries is at least convenient: sharp, high-acid fruit is the most forgiving candidate for a method of this kind. The instruction to tie the cork down with leather, and to store in a dry place, is a reminder that the closure was borrowed from the wine cellar rather than designed for preserved food.