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PEAS, GREEN, BOTTLED (another way)
Choose peas which are large and fully grown, though not old. Put them into perfectly dry wide-mouthed bottles, shake them down, cork securely, and cover the corks with bladder. Tie a wisp of hay round the lower part of the bottles to prevent their knocking against each other in the pan, put them side by side in a large saucepan, and pour into it as much cold water as will reach to their necks. Put the saucepan on the fire, and let it remain for two hours after the water has reached the boiling point, then take it off, but do not remove the bottles until the water is cold. Seal the corks, and store in a cool dry place.
This is a boiling-water process for a low-acid vegetable, sealed with cork and bladder. It is the classic set-up for botulism and cannot be recommended in any form; the notes below explain the specific failures rather than offering a fix.
- Peas are low-acidGreen peas sit around pH 6.2, well above the 4.6 threshold below which Clostridium botulinum cannot grow. Low-acid vegetables can only be safely canned at 240-250F, which requires a pressure canner; water in an open pan cannot exceed 212F however long it is held there.
- Two hours at boiling does not steriliseBotulinum spores survive prolonged boiling. The two-hour hold kills competing bacteria and moulds, which removes the spoilage organisms that would otherwise warn you the jar has gone off, while leaving the dangerous spores intact in an oxygen-free bottle.
- The toxin is not visiblePeas canned this way can look, smell and taste entirely normal and still carry botulinum toxin. There is no reliable household test.
- Cork and bladderA cork covered with bladder and then sealed is not a hermetic closure by modern standards. It can weep, admit air unevenly and give a false impression of a good seal; no current preserving guidance accepts it.
- Bottles in a pan of waterThe hay wisp is there because glass knocking against glass in a rolling pan cracks. Sealed bottles heated with no headspace control and no vent are also a pressure hazard as the contents expand.
- What to do insteadFreeze fresh peas, or follow a current tested pressure-canning schedule from a food-safety authority. Do not adapt the timings above.
Bottling vegetables in corked glass and heating them in a water bath belongs to the tradition of the method Nicolas Appert published in France in 1810, for which the French government awarded him a prize, food preservation for the navy and the army being the pressing motive; his name survives in the word appertisation. Appert and his imitators worked empirically: they knew that heating sealed food kept it, but the microbiology that would explain why some foods needed far more heat than others was decades away, and botulinum itself was not identified until the 1890s, from an outbreak traced to preserved ham. Cassell's, compiling household practice at the end of the nineteenth century, prints the technique in good faith and with the confidence of long domestic use. Green peas were a prized early-summer crop with a very short season, and the wish to eat them in January drove a great deal of ingenuity; the same wish is now met by the frozen pea, which is picked and blanched within hours and holds its sweetness far better than anything bottled.