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APRICOTS, TO BOTTLE (For Tarts in Winter Time)
Choose some ripe apricots: pare, stone, and quarter them. Lay them on a dish with powdered sugar strewn over them in the proportion of two ounces of sugar to every pound of fruit. Let them remain thus for two or three hours; then put them into wide-mouthed bottles, cover them and place them up to their necks in a saucepan of cold water. Keep them there until the water boils. Cork the bottles and wax them securely. Time to boil, half an hour.
This is a Victorian bottling method, and the preserving technique at its centre is the part that has been superseded. The notes below explain the units and the vessels, and then why the sealing method cannot be relied on.
- The seal is the problemCorking a hot bottle and running wax over the top does not produce a vacuum seal. As the contents cool the cork is as likely to be pushed out as pulled in, and wax shrinks and cracks away from glass over months in a cupboard. A jar that looks sealed but is not is the whole danger of the method.
- Neither time nor temperature is controlledThe time is given but the heat delivered is not -- "Keep them there until the water boils" plus "Time to boil, half an hour" fixes the length of the boil but not the temperature reached at the centre of the fruit, which depends on bottle size, glass thickness and how full the bottles are. Modern fruit processing is specified in minutes at a stated jar size and altitude for exactly this reason.
- Mould and yeast, not just bacteriaApricots are acidic enough that botulism is not the leading concern, but a failed seal on sugared fruit is an open invitation to surface moulds and fermenting yeasts. Some storage moulds on stone fruit produce mycotoxins that are not destroyed by later cooking in a tart.
- Wide-mouthed bottlesThese were plain glass bottles closed with a cork, one of the common household preserving vessels of the period, used alongside stoneware jars and patent jars. They have no gasket and no means of showing whether a seal has formed or later failed.
- The sugar stepTwo ounces of sugar to the pound of fruit, left two or three hours, is a maceration that draws juice out of the apricots so they pack down and sit in their own syrup. It is a texture and flavour step, not a preservative one; at that ratio the sugar concentration is nowhere near enough to inhibit spoilage.
- If you want bottled apricotsUse a current tested water-bath canning recipe with two-piece lids, stated jar sizes and stated processing times, or simply freeze the sugared quarters.
Bottling fruit "for tarts in winter time" was a common late-summer job in households with a garden or a good greengrocer, and the same technique was applied to plums, gooseberries, damsons and cherries alike. The underlying method descends from the work of Nicolas Appert in early nineteenth-century France, who established that food heated in a sealed vessel would keep, decades before anyone could explain why; British domestic manuals absorbed the practice long before pasteurisation gave it a theory. What the recipe shows is a kitchen working at the limit of its everyday equipment: the heating is sound in principle, but cork and sealing wax were what many households had to hand, even though patent screw-band and clip-top preserving jars were already being made in this period.