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Damsons, Bottled
Bullaces or damsons are valuable for winter use, and, bottled like green gooseberries, make good tarts. Put them into wide-necked glass bottles, tie the tops over with bladder, and set them in a boiler of cold water, with a little straw at the bottom. Bring the water to the boil, and then remove the pot from the fire, but let the bottles remain to become cold. In a few hours, or better, the next day, remove the pieces of bladder, and replace them by tight-fitting corks, first filling the bottles with pounded sugar. The corks should be secured with wax.
This is a nineteenth-century bottling method, and the sequence of steps is what makes it unusable rather than any single ingredient. The notes below explain the vocabulary and then the specific point of failure.
- The seal is broken after processingThe bottles are heated under bladder, cooled, and then opened again to add sugar and fit corks. Everything gained by the heating is lost at that moment: the fruit is recontaminated from the air, the hands and the sugar, and it is never heated again. A cork sealed with wax is not a hermetic closure and will not hold a vacuum.
- No temperature, no time, no measureThe water is brought to a boil and the pot is then pulled off the fire, so the fruit itself may never reach boiling and the hold time is whatever the cooling water happens to give. There is no quantity of sugar, no headspace, no processing schedule. Nothing here can be verified, which is why a current tested recipe for bottled or canned plums should be used instead.
- BladderAn animal bladder (pig's or ox), soaked soft, tied over the bottle mouth and allowed to dry taut — a common Victorian preserving cover before rubber rings and lacquered lids. It is porous, it is animal tissue, and it is not a food-safe material by any modern standard.
- Glass in a boilerThe straw in the bottom of the pot is there to keep thin glass off the hot metal base. Bottles of this kind were not tempered for canning, and blown glass with a narrow neck under thermal stress is a well-known way to get glass through a stone floor and into fruit.
- Bullaces and damsonsBoth are small, tart, dark plums — Prunus domestica subsp. insititia — with a high acid content and clinging stones. Damsons still turn up at farmers' markets in late summer; bullaces are now largely a hedgerow fruit. Their acidity is exactly why they were considered reliable keepers, but acidity alone does not compensate for an open-and-reseal method.
- BoilerIn this book a boiler is a large fixed or free-standing pot for heating water, not a sealed pressure vessel. There is no pressure processing anywhere in this recipe.
Cassell's places bottled damsons among the winter stores because until reliable commercial canning reached ordinary households, a cook who wanted fruit tarts in February had to have put the fruit up herself in August. The technique described here is the older English "bottling" tradition — fruit sealed under bladder and heated in a water bath — which predates the screw-top preserving jars that spread through British kitchens in the later nineteenth century and eventually displaced it. Bladder was the general-purpose sealing material of the period, used for potted meats and preserves alike, and pounded sugar poured in dry served both as a sweetener and as a supposed barrier against spoilage. Damsons in particular earned their place in the household calendar because they are too sharp to be worth eating raw, cook down to a deep colour, and grow, often untended, in hedges and orchard corners across the English Midlands and North.