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Pineapple, Bottled
Be very careful that the pineapples are perfectly sound and ripe. Pare them, and remove the specks. Cut the fruit into slices half an inch thick, and divide these into halves. Put them into dry wide-mouthed bottles, and cover them with syrup. Wrap a wisp of hay round each bottle. Put them side by side in a boiler, with cold water up to their necks. Bring the water to a boil, and let it boil gently for twenty minutes. Draw the pan aside, cork the bottles and let them remain until they are quite cold. Wax the corks, and store in a cool cellar. The syrup, which is to be poured over the fruit, should be made as follows. Dissolve three pounds of loaf sugar in a quart of water. Stir in half the white of an egg, and stir the syrup over the fire for two or three minutes. Let it boil, and skim carefully. In order to assist the scum in rising, throw in a spoonful of cold water two or three times. Strain the syrup through a napkin, and it will be ready for use. Time to boil the bottled fruit, twenty minutes. Probable cost, pineapples, when cheap, 1s. to 2s. each.
This is a Victorian bottling method, and the preserving step is the part that has not survived. The notes below explain the vocabulary and then why the process cannot be relied on.
- Why the seal failsThe bottles are processed uncorked, then corked once the pan is drawn aside and left to cool. As the contents cool they contract and can draw unsterilised air, and whatever is on the cork and bottle neck, back into the jar. Waxed cork is not a hermetic closure and gives no reliable vacuum and no visual sign of failure.
- No sterilisation of the closureNothing in the method disinfects the corks, and cork is porous and impossible to sterilise reliably. A cool cellar slows spoilage organisms but does not stop yeasts and moulds, which will ferment a heavy sugar syrup over months.
- Twenty minutes at an unknown temperatureThe water is brought to a gentle boil with the bottles standing to the neck, so the fruit at the centre of a wide-mouthed bottle may never reach boiling. There is no stated jar size, headspace or altitude adjustment, which is exactly the information a modern canning process is built on. If you want bottled pineapple, use a current tested recipe from a food-safety authority.
- The wisp of hayHay was wrapped round each bottle to stop the glass knocking together and cracking in the boiler, and to keep the bottles from resting directly on the hot metal base. It is also raw agricultural material pressed against the bottle necks, which tells you something about the standard of cleanliness assumed.
- Loaf sugarSugar sold in hard cones, broken and crushed for use. It was simply refined white sugar; granulated sugar is the equivalent, and three pounds to a quart of water is a very heavy syrup, on the order of 55 per cent sugar by weight.
- Clarifying with egg whiteHalf a beaten egg white stirred into the syrup coagulates as it heats and traps fine impurities, which rise as scum and are skimmed off. The splashes of cold water check the boil so the scum can gather at the surface rather than being churned back in. Modern refined sugar is clean enough that the step is unnecessary.
- The costingOne to two shillings each was the price of a pineapple in Britain when, as the entry puts it, they were "cheap" — a real sum in a period when a working wage was measured in shillings a week. The note is a reminder that this was an economy measure for a luxury glut, not an everyday preserve.
Pineapples reached British tables first as hothouse curiosities, grown in heated pineries on great estates from the eighteenth century, and only became broadly purchasable once steamships brought fruit from the West Indies and the Azores in quantity in the later nineteenth century. Even then they were expensive enough that a household buying at the bottom of the market would want to put the surplus by, and Cassell's gives the entry under the heading 'Pineapple, Bottled' in its alphabetical arrangement rather than treating it as a novelty. The method itself is the standard Victorian fruit-bottling technique u pack, cover with clarified syrup, heat in a water bath, close, store cold u applied to a fruit that behaves well in it, since pineapple is acidic and holds its shape in heavy syrup. Commercial canning in tinplate, developed through the same century and established in Hawaii by the 1900s, is generally thought to have made this kind of domestic bottling largely redundant in the decades after the book's publication.