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Bottled Red Currants
Pick from the stalks some currants barely ripe, and of the red variety; pack them very closely into bottles, fill up the bottles with twenty-two degree syrup. Place them in a pan with hot water, and let their contents boil for ten minutes. Then take the bottles out of the water, cork them, and when cold they are ready for storing.
This is a turn-of-the-century bottling method, and the preserving step is where it breaks down by current standards. The fruit itself is unobjectionable; the closure and the sequence are not.
- Corked after processing, not sealed during itThe bottles are heated open, lifted out, and only then corked. Nothing pulls a vacuum, and a driven cork is not a hermetic seal — air and its spoilage organisms enter as the contents cool and contract. Modern practice seals the jar before processing so the headspace evacuates itself.
- No headspace, no measured temperature"Pack them very closely" and "let their contents boil for ten minutes" give neither fill level nor a verified internal temperature. Fruit packed to the shoulder expands and forces liquid past the cork, leaving the top of the pack dry and exposed.
- The bottles themselvesOrdinary glass bottles are not annealed for thermal shock the way modern canning jars are, and their narrow necks cannot be fitted with a two-piece lid. Moving glass between boiling water and cool air is a plausible route to breakage, though the recipe gives no indication of how often such bottles actually failed.
- Why not a botulism warningRed currants are strongly acidic, generally around pH 3, which is well below the range in which Clostridium botulinum can grow. The realistic failure here is mould, wild yeast and fermentation in an imperfectly sealed bottle — spoilage rather than toxin, but spoilage that can be hard to see through dark fruit.
- What the numbers meant"Twenty-two degree syrup" is almost certainly a Baume hydrometer reading, roughly 40 per cent sugar by weight — a medium syrup, not a heavy one. Syrups of this kind were gauged with a hydrometer, an instrument common in professional kitchens of the period, though the recipe says nothing about how the reading was taken.
- "Barely ripe" was deliberate"Barely ripe" was probably deliberate -- Underripe red currants carry more pectin and acid than fully ripe ones, which helps them hold their shape in syrup and set well later in jelly and sauce. The instruction most likely concerns texture and keeping quality rather than hurrying the harvest.
- If you want bottled currantsUse a current tested water-bath canning recipe with specified jar size, headspace and processing time for your altitude, or simply freeze the fruit, which suits currants very well.
Oscar Tschirky was the Waldorf's maitre d'hotel rather than its chef, but the book that carries his name was compiled from hotel practice, and that practice ran on a European larder discipline: fruit put up in the short weeks it was available, in graded sugar syrups measured by hydrometer, so that garnishes and sauces could be produced in February. Bottled red currants would have been larder stock rather than a dessert in themselves — the sort of fruit that went into Cumberland sauce for cold game, into glazes for tarts, and into jelly. The Baume scale was in use in professional confectionery before it was common in domestic kitchens, and its appearance in a book aimed partly at household readers suggests hotel usage was carried over with little translation. Currants largely disappeared from American markets in the early twentieth century, after federal and state restrictions on Ribes cultivation to protect white pines from blister rust; the bans have since been relaxed, but the fruit never regained its place.