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ORLEANS PLUMS (to bottle for winter use)
Have in readiness some perfectly clean and dry wide-necked bottles. Pick the fruit, which must be sound and freshly gathered, rub it well with a soft cloth, taking care not to injure the skins, and put it into the bottles; fill these up with a syrup made by boiling three-quarters of a pound of sugar with half a pint of water for ten minutes. Cork the bottles closely, tie a piece of moistened bladder over them, and put them in a large pan of water over a gentle fire. Let the water boil for a quarter of an hour, then lift the pan off the fire, leaving the bottles in the vessel until the water is cold. Store the fruit in a dry place. Probable cost of plums, 3d. to 6d. per pound.
This is a Victorian water-bath bottling method, and the failure is in the closure rather than the fruit. Plums are acidic enough to be safely home-canned by modern tested methods, but nothing in this procedure produces or verifies a seal.
- The seal cannot be trustedA driven cork and a piece of moistened animal bladder tied over the neck give no vacuum and no way to check that one formed. Fruit stored for months at room temperature under such a closure is open to mould and yeast spoilage, and a bottle that looks intact may not be.
- Corking before heatingThe bottles are stoppered closely and then boiled for fifteen minutes. Sealed glass with expanding contents and trapped air over a direct flame is a burst-bottle risk; modern water-bath practice fills to a measured headspace and uses lids designed to vent during processing and seal on cooling.
- No processing standard"Let the water boil for a quarter of an hour" ignores jar size, fill temperature and altitude, all of which change the time needed to heat the centre of the pack. Use a current tested water-bath recipe for plums in syrup if you want to preserve fruit this way.
- Moistened bladderPig or ox bladder, soaked to soften and shrinking tight as it dried, was one of the common sealing membranes before rubber rings and lacquered lids. It is a raw animal product laid directly over food; it has no place in a modern preserving kitchen.
- Imperial measuresThe half pint is an imperial half pint, 10 fluid ounces or about 1 1/4 US cups, boiled with 12 oz of sugar. That is a heavy syrup, roughly 55 per cent sugar by weight before evaporation, and sweeter than most modern canning syrups.
- The varietyOrleans is an old dark-red European plum, grown for both dessert and preserving. Any firm, slightly underripe purple plum behaves much the same way in syrup; fully soft fruit collapses.
- The price noteThreepence to sixpence a pound places this in the late nineteenth-century British market. It is a costing note for a household budget, not a measurement.
Bottling whole fruit in syrup was the domestic answer to a glut: pick sound fruit at once, exclude air, heat gently, cool slowly. The method descends from the earlier practice of preserving fruit in corked bottles set in a copper of water, and it worked well enough when the bottles were sound and the bladder shrank tight, which is why generations of cookbooks repeated it. What the Victorians lacked was a reliable closure; Mason's screw-top jar in America and the rubber-ringed glass-lidded jars that followed in Europe are what turned this from a gamble into a reproducible process. The Orleans plum itself is an old European variety, generally traced to France by its name and long grown in English gardens as both a dessert and a preserving fruit.