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Cherries, to Bottle
Have ready some wide-mouthed bottles, such as are generally used for bottling fruit, and ascertain that they are quite dry. Cut the stalks from the cherries--do not pull them out--put the fruit into the bottles, shake them down, and put two table--spoonfuls of finely-sifted loaf sugar at the top of every bottle. Cork them closely, and tie them down; put them into a large pan of cold water, bring it to a boil, let it stand on the hob for five minutes, then lift the vessel from the fire, and let the bottles remain in it until the water is cold. The juice of the fruit ought to cover it. The corks must be looked after when the fruit has been scalded, and refitted if necessary. When the fruit comes to be used, the juice ought to be strained off, and boiled with a little sugar, and, when cold, put into the tarts instead of water. Time, about an hour. Probable cost of cherries, 3d. to 6d. per pound.
This is a Victorian fruit-bottling method, and it is the preserving technique rather than the fruit that is the problem. The notes below explain the old vocabulary and then why this particular procedure should not be followed.
- Why the method failsThe whole preservation rests on a cork tied down with string. That is not a hermetic seal: as the bottle cools it draws air and water back past the cork, and the instruction to refit corks afterwards admits as much. Nothing here is held at a measured temperature for a measured time, so there is no way to know the contents were ever processed.
- Cherries are not reliably acidicCherries are acid, but not by a wide margin -- sweet cherries are normally reckoned a high-acid fruit, though their pH sits nearer the upper end of that range than sour cherries do, and no acid is added here. Any food that drifts above pH 4.6 in a sealed, oxygen-poor container is in the range where Clostridium botulinum can grow, and boiling-water processing alone does not destroy its spores.
- Underfilled bottlesThe recipe hopes the juice "ought to cover" the fruit but does not ensure it. Cherries left standing in air above the juice line mould readily, and a mould film can raise the pH of the surrounding syrup over weeks of storage.
- Five minutes on the hobThe hob is the shelf at the side of an open range where a pan sits to keep hot without boiling hard. So the fruit is scalded rather than properly processed, and the timing depends entirely on how hot one particular Victorian grate happened to be.
- Loaf sugarSugar sold in a hard cone, scraped or crushed and then sieved to a fine powder. Modern caster sugar is the nearest thing. Two tablespoonfuls per bottle is a flavouring quantity, not a preserving one, and contributes nothing to safety.
- If you want bottled cherriesUse a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority, with proper two-piece lids or Kilner-type jars and specified processing times.
- The cost line"3d. to 6d. per pound" is threepence to sixpence in pre-decimal money, a period price guide rather than a measurement; a 'probable cost' line appears as a matter of course at the end of these entries.
Bottling fruit in glass under a tied cork was a common British domestic preserving method in the nineteenth century, sitting between the older sugar-heavy jams and the sealed jars that eventually replaced it. The principle is generally traced to Nicolas Appert, who published his work on preserving food in sealed vessels heated in a water bath in 1810; the Kilner glassworks was established in Yorkshire in 1842, and screw-top British fruit jars came into wider household use later in the century, though cheap wide-mouthed bottles and corks remained normal in ordinary kitchens for decades after. Cassell's assumes a cook who bottles in season and draws on the store all winter, which is why the entry ends not with the preserve itself but with what to do with the juice: strained, boiled with sugar, and used in tarts "instead of water".