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Canned Currants
Mrs. Wicker.
Put sufficient sugar to prepare them for the table, then boil them ten minutes and seal hot as possible. 1
This is an open-kettle canning method, and it is the one nineteenth-century preserving technique that current guidance rejects outright. The points below explain what the instruction leaves out and why that matters.
- No measured sugar"Sufficient sugar to prepare them for the table" means sweeten to taste, as you would for stewed fruit. That is a serving instruction, not a preserving one: in canning, sugar ratio affects texture and keeping quality, and a recipe that cannot state it cannot be evaluated for safety.
- Open-kettle sealingFilling jars with hot fruit and sealing at once relies on the cooling contents to pull a vacuum. It does nothing to sterilise the jar rim, the lid or the headspace air, and seals formed this way can fail silently weeks later. Modern practice requires a measured boiling-water process after filling.
- No processing time givenThe ten minutes here is the cooking of the fruit in the kettle, not a processing time in the jar. There is no instruction covering jar preparation, headspace, or how long sealed jars are held at temperature.
- What actually spoilsCurrants are high-acid fruit, so Clostridium botulinum is not the primary hazard here as it would be with beans or corn. The realistic failures are yeasts and moulds growing under a weak seal, and fermentation that pushes the lid off in storage.
- The sealing hardware has changedA contributor of this period would have been working with wax-sealed or zinc-and-rubber-ring jars, where "seal hot as possible" was the whole of the method. Modern two-piece lids are designed around a water-bath or pressure process and behave differently.
- If you want to preserve currantsUse a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority, which will specify fruit-to-sugar ratio, headspace and processing time for your altitude.
- The trailing "1"The stray numeral is an artefact of the original book's typesetting or referencing, not part of the recipe.
The Home Cook Book was a Chicago charity compilation, its receipts gathered by name from local housekeepers and sold to support a benevolent institution — which is why this entry is credited to Mrs. Wicker and why it is barely a sentence long. Contributors were writing for readers assumed to know the work already; the currants, the kettle and the jars needed no explanation, only the maker's particular ratio and timing. Currants themselves were a fixture of nineteenth-century American kitchen gardens, valued for setting readily into jelly without added pectin and for their sharpness against heavy meats. Their near-disappearance from American cooking came later, when Ribes species were found to host white pine blister rust and cultivation was restricted in many states through much of the twentieth century — a ban since lifted in most places, though the fruit never regained its old ubiquity.