Home › The Principles of Cookery › Pineapple, Bottled, Without Boiling
Pineapple, Bottled, Without Boiling
Choose pineapples which, though ripe, are perfectly sound. Pare the fruit, remove the specks, and cut them into slices a quarter of an inch thick. Weigh them, and allow one pound of powdered and sifted sugar to each pound of pines. Put a layer of the sugar half an inch deep at the bottom of a small glass jar. Place on this a layer of equal depth of sliced fruit. Press it down, and repeat until the jar is full, remembering only that the first and last layer must be of sugar. Fit the cover as closely as possible, to keep the jar air-tight.
This is a preserving method, not a dish, and it belongs to a period before anyone understood what actually keeps sealed fruit safe. The following points explain why it fails rather than how to attempt it.
- No heat step at any pointNothing in the process reaches a temperature that destroys yeasts, moulds or their spores — the fruit goes into the jar raw, along with whatever is on the knife, the board, the sugar and the rind. The jar is then closed as tightly as possible, which suppresses nothing and simply traps the contamination with a food source.
- The sugar is too dilute to preserveSugar preserves by binding water, but it only works above roughly 65-70 per cent sugar in the finished syrup. Fresh pineapple is about 85 per cent water, so equal weights of fruit and sugar produce a syrup near 50 per cent once the fruit gives up its juice — sweet, but well inside the range where osmotolerant yeasts and moulds will grow.
- Fermentation is the likely outcomePineapple carries a heavy natural yeast load on its skin, and a warm sealed jar of dilute sugar syrup is close to ideal for it. Expect gas pressure, alcohol, and in a modern screw-top jar the real possibility of the lid letting go.
- Mould, and what mould leaves behindSurface moulds on stored fruit are not simply skimmed off. Some of the moulds found on fruit and preserves can produce mycotoxins — patulin is the best documented, chiefly in apple products — and such toxins can diffuse into the food below the visible growth, which is why current advice is to discard the contents once mould appears.
- "Air-tight" meant something differentA Victorian glass jar with a fitted cover, sometimes bladder- or paper-sealed, was never a vacuum seal. The book is asking for the exclusion of air, which was then thought to be the whole of preservation — the germ theory of spoilage was still working its way into domestic manuals.
- If you want preserved pineappleUse a current tested recipe from a recognised food-preservation authority, which will specify a heat process and a verified seal. Do not adapt the instructions above.
Cassell's belongs to the decades when pineapple shifted from luxury to grocery. Grown at ruinous expense in English hothouses and pineries through the Georgian period, then shipped in quantity from the West Indies and the Azores as steam routes shortened the voyage, it was by the 1870s and 1880s a fruit a middle-class household might reasonably buy and want to keep. Recipes "without boiling" sit alongside the uncooked jams and sugared soft fruit of the era, and sugar had a long reputation as a preservative in its own right; avoiding heat was generally held to spare the flavour and texture of delicate fruit. What the compilers lacked was any measure of how much sugar was actually needed, and they appear to have treated spoilage as a consequence of contact with air rather than of living organisms; the instruction to fit the cover "as closely as possible" is the whole of the science as it stood. Reliable domestic bottling arrived only with the spread of the Mason-type jar and, more importantly, with instructions that told the cook to heat the jar and for how long.