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Canned Currants
4 pounds sugar Wash, stem, and cover currants with sugar; let stand in preserving kettle over night. Cook slowly until boiling point is reached, skim, fill sterilized jars, and seal.
This is a fragment of a longer recipe list: the fruit weight has been lost from the heading, leaving only the sugar, and the sealing method is one that food-safety authorities abandoned decades ago.
- The missing quantityOnly "4 pounds sugar" survives. Preserving recipes of this period often ran currants at roughly equal weights of fruit and sugar, and sometimes rather less sugar than fruit, but the original figure here is genuinely gone and cannot be reconstructed from the text.
- Open-kettle canningFilling sterilized jars with hot fruit and sealing, with no processing afterward, is what was called the open-kettle method. It relies on the jar contents and the headspace being sterile at the moment of closure, which they routinely are not. Modern practice processes filled jars in a boiling-water bath for a measured time, and this recipe gives none.
- No temperature, no time"Cook slowly until boiling point is reached" describes the fruit only, not the jars. There is no processing time, no headspace, no venting or checking of seals, and no instruction on lids, which in 1907 would have meant zinc caps or glass lids used with rubber rings rather than the two-piece closures sold now.
- What actually goes wrongCurrants are high-acid fruit, so botulism is not the primary concern; spoilage is. Unprocessed jars sealed this way fail at a meaningful rate and grow yeasts and molds, sometimes under a seal that looks sound. Some molds on fruit preserves produce mycotoxins, and skimming a fuzzy jar does not remove them.
- A preserving kettleA preserving kettle of the period was typically a wide pan of copper, brass, or enamelled iron; the recipe does not say which. Any wide non-reactive pot serves the same purpose.
- The overnight macerationStanding sugared overnight is the one sound instruction here. It draws juice from the berries so they come to a boil in their own syrup rather than scorching, and it firms the skins slightly. The technique is worth borrowing even from a recipe you will not follow.
- If you want canned currantsUse a current tested recipe from a reputable preserving authority, with a stated water-bath processing time for your jar size and altitude.
Currants were a fixture of the American preserving pantry when this book appeared in 1907, largely because they are among the easiest fruits to grow in the Northeast and among the highest in natural pectin and acid, which makes them set into jelly with almost no coaxing. Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like most house-brand cookbooks of the period it surrounded its promotional chocolate chapters with a full general household manual, preserving section included. Within a few years of publication the Ribes genus began to disappear from American gardens: federal and state programs beginning around 1911 restricted currant and gooseberry cultivation because the plants host white pine blister rust, and the bans held in many states for most of the twentieth century. That is a large part of why a fruit taken entirely for granted on this page is a specialty item today.