Important: Safety Warning
This page describes home-canning methods from before the causes of botulism were understood. Canning low-acid foods without a pressure canner, as described here, can allow the growth of Clostridium botulinum, whose toxin is among the deadliest known. Follow current USDA home-canning guidelines instead.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Home › The Principles of Cookery › Greengages, to Bottle
Greengages, to Bottle
Choose perfectly sound greengages, gathered on a dry day, before they are fully ripe. Put them into wide-mouthed bottles, and fill these with syrup, made by boiling a pint of water with a pound of sugar for four or five minutes. Cork securely, and put them up to their necks in a large pan of cold water, with straw between the bottles to prevent them cracking. Bring the contents of the pan slowly to a boil; after boiling, simmer gently for a quarter of an hour; leave them until cold, seal the corks securely, and keep the bottles in a cool place, with the necks downwards. If there is any leakage, the fruit must be used at once; otherwise, it will keep for years. Probable cost of greengages, when in full season, 6d. per quart.
This is a preserving procedure rather than a dish, and the procedure is the part that has been superseded. The notes below explain what the original is doing and where it fails against current practice.
- The cork is the problemA driven cork sealed after processing cannot form a reliable vacuum seal, and it gives no visual signal of seal failure the way a modern lid does. Storing the bottles neck-down, as directed, would have kept the syrup against the cork, which may well be why it was recommended: a leak would show itself. Any process that depends on the cook noticing a slow leak is not a process.
- No vent, no headspace, no measured temperatureThe bottles are filled with syrup and corked before heating, so expanding liquid and trapped air have nowhere to go. Current guidelines specify headspace, air removal, a measured jar temperature and a timed hold at a known temperature; "bring slowly to a boil, then simmer gently a quarter of an hour" is none of those.
- Why plums are still not a free passGreengages are high-acid fruit, which is why this method worked as often as it did; botulism risk is far lower in acidified fruit than in beans or meat. But underripe fruit in a heavy syrup, sealed by a cork that may or may not have held, is a straightforward invitation to yeast and mould spoilage, and the recipe's own advice is that a leaking bottle must be eaten at once. Use a current USDA or equivalent tested process for plums instead.
- Reading the original quantitiesThe syrup is a pound of sugar to a pint of water, which by weight is a little under a 1:1 syrup and by modern reckoning a medium-heavy syrup. A pint here is the imperial pint of 20 fl oz, not the American 16.
- Straw between the bottlesThis is a genuine and still-sound principle, adapted in modern canners as a rack and cloth: glass must not touch glass or the bare bottom of the pan, or thermal shock and knocking will crack it.
- "6d. per quart"Greengages are priced here by volume rather than weight; sixpence a quart suggests a cheap fruit at the height of a short English season, which is one reason for bottling them.
Greengages are a group of green-skinned dessert plums, and the English name is generally traced to the Gage family of Suffolk, who are said to have received the trees from France in the early eighteenth century with their labels lost, the French name being reine-claude. The variety has a very short season and does not travel or keep, which is exactly the position in which Victorian households turned to bottling: a quart for sixpence in August against nothing at all by October. Cassell's belongs to the last generation of cookery books written before the science caught up with the practice; the bottling of fruit in corked wide-mouthed bottles, heated in a pan of water packed with straw, was standard domestic technique from the early nineteenth century onward and predates both the reliable screw-band lid and any understanding of what could grow in a jar that had not sealed.