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Carrot Sweetmeats
Boil small fine-grained carrots in water till tender; peel and grate, add sugar, slips of citron, spices if preferred, and wine; simmer slowly together and put away in jars. Very wholesome for children and very much liked. The juice from any canned fruit sold would take the place of the simple wine used here the alcoholic mixtures sold in America being utterly unfit for household consumption.-Mrs. S. Williston, Heidelberg, Germany.
This is a shelf-stored preserve built on a low-acid vegetable, with no quantities, no acid and no processing given. The notes below explain the terms and why the storage instruction is the problem.
- Why it fails as a preserveCarrots are a low-acid vegetable, and cooked carrot held in a sealed jar at room temperature is a textbook medium for Clostridium botulinum, which grows without oxygen and produces a toxin you cannot see, smell or taste. Nothing here lowers the pH or brings the sealed jar to a temperature that would destroy spores.
- No measured sugarSugar preserves fruit by binding water, but only above roughly 65 percent by weight of the finished product. The recipe gives no ratio at all, so there is no way to know whether the sugar concentration is anywhere near preserving strength. "Add sugar" is not a quantity.
- "Put away in jars"The recipe specifies no seal, no process and no storage temperature; in household writing of this period the phrase could mean anything from a paper- or wax-covered jar in a cool cupboard to a sealed glass canning jar, and neither is a safe process for this mixture. Any modern carrot preserve needs a tested recipe with measured acid and a specified process; use one rather than adapting this.
- The wine substitution makes it worseThe wine substitution -- Mrs. Williston's suggestion to replace the wine with canned fruit juice swaps out what little acid and alcohol the wine contributed; in a simmered, unmeasured mixture neither was doing much preservative work in the first place, and neither substitution makes the jar safe. Her aside about American "alcoholic mixtures" most likely reflects temperance sentiment and the period's poor reputation for adulterated domestic wine, rather than a food-safety judgement.
- CitronNot the citrus fruit itself but candied citron peel, sold in slabs or diced for fruitcake. It is still available around the winter holidays and in Italian and German groceries; "slips" means thin strips.
- "Spices if preferred"For a German carrot sweetmeat this would plausibly mean cinnamon, clove, a little mace, perhaps lemon peel, though the recipe names none and simply leaves the choice to the cook.
- If you want the flavourA grated-carrot conserve of this kind is close to a fresh compote once you strip away the storage. Make a current, tested recipe for carrot jam or carrot conserve, which will specify lemon juice and a processing time.
Carrot sweetmeats belong to a long European tradition of treating the carrot as a sugar vegetable rather than a savoury one — a habit that survives in Continental carrot jams, in the sugar-boiled carrot confections of Persia and North India, and eventually in carrot cake. The Dixie Cook Book filled itself out with contributions solicited from correspondents, and the credit line here — Mrs. S. Williston, Heidelberg — gives only a name and a place; the guess that she was an American housewife abroad, sending back something German, rests on little more than her closing swipe at American wine. That swipe is worth noting on its own. Domestic wine of the period is often said to have been adulterated or fortified with raw spirit, and temperance feeling seems to have run strong through the household literature of the decade, so a writer could dismiss the whole category in a subordinate clause and expect her readers to nod along. The claim that the preserve is "very wholesome for children" reflects the same era's confidence that sugar, spice and a vegetable together amounted to a tonic.