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Preserved Truffles
Wash well and scrub the required number or quantity of truffles which should be quite black and freshly gathered, peel them carefully rather thin, pack them closely in bottles, cork them tightly, place them in the bain-marie or in a saucepan of water and cook them gently for an hour or so. Allow the bottles to cool before taking them out; put them in a dry place and the truffles will remain good for a long time.
Removing Salt from Butter Place three or four pounds of salted butter in a bowl, pouring over it sufficient water to cover and beat until the water is slightly colored; then pour off the water and add some more and keep on in this manner until the water remains quite clear-after the beating.
This is a home-canning procedure for a low-acid food, and it does not meet any modern standard for shelf-stable preserving. The notes below explain why the method fails rather than how to adapt it.
- The hazard is botulismTruffles are subterranean fungi lifted straight out of soil, the natural reservoir of Clostridium botulinum spores. Sealing them, unacidified, in an airtight bottle creates precisely the oxygen-free, low-acid, room-temperature environment in which those spores germinate and produce toxin.
- An hour in simmering water is not sterilisationA bain-marie or a saucepan of water tops out at 212F. Botulinum spores in a low-acid food require pressure processing well above that temperature; boiling-water processing of any length will not destroy them. The recipe's own promise that the truffles "will remain good for a long time" is the problem, not the reassurance.
- No quantities, no times that can be verifiedNo quantities, and no processing schedule that can be checked -- The recipe gives only a vague 'an hour or so', with no jar size, headspace, or acidification, and no processing time tied to any of them. There is nothing here that could be checked against a tested process, which is a second reason it cannot be salvaged by adjustment.
- Corks are not sealsA tight cork gives no vacuum and no reliable barrier, and it offers no visual signal of spoilage the way a failed vacuum lid does. Toxin-bearing preserves frequently look, smell and taste entirely normal.
- If you want to keep trufflesFollow a current, tested preserving process from a food-safety authority, or use the methods that need no processing at all: fresh truffles keep some days refrigerated in a sealed container, and freeze acceptably for grating.
- On the vesselBain-marie here means simply a water bath on the stovetop, the standard gentle-heat setup of a professional kitchen of the period, not a piece of equipment you would need to buy.
The kitchen this comes from worked in the French idiom, and truffles were a defining luxury of that idiom -- shaved over sauces, studded through galantines and forcemeats, sliced into Périgueux sauce. Fresh black truffles are a winter crop and reached New York across the Atlantic by ship, so a house that used them constantly had every incentive to bottle them while they were, as the recipe specifies, "quite black and freshly gathered." Commercially bottled and tinned truffles were already a substantial French export trade by the 1890s; what this entry records is a hotel kitchen doing the same thing for itself, in a period confident that heat plus a sealed vessel equalled preservation but which did not yet know which organisms survive a boiling-water bath. The second, unrelated note on washing salt out of butter belongs to the same practical impulse -- salted butter was the keeping grade, and the salt had to be beaten out before it could be used in delicate pastry or sauce.