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Plums, Preserved, for Making Pies
Divide the fruit, and take out the stones. Put the plums into a deep jar, place this in a saucepan of boiling water, and let them boil gently until the juice flows freely. Then with each pound of the fruit put an ounce of crushed loaf sugar. When the sugar is dissolved by the hot juice, pour the whole into wide-mouthed glass bottles. Cover the tops closely, and store in a cool place. Plums preserved in this way will keep for a short time only. Time, about an hour.
This is a Victorian bottling method for holding pie fruit a few weeks, and it does not meet any modern standard for preserving. The notes below explain what the instructions assume and where they fall short.
- No processing step, no sealThe fruit is heated in a jar standing in boiling water, then poured hot into bottles that are simply "covered closely." There is no measured processing time, no temperature, and no vacuum seal — nothing that makes the contents shelf-stable. In an unsealed, unprocessed jar of low-sugar fruit, mould and yeast growth are the likely outcome.
- The sugar is not doing preserving workAn ounce of sugar per pound of fruit is roughly six per cent by weight. Preserving sugar concentrations begin around 60 per cent, which is why jam keeps and this does not. Here the sugar is for flavour and to draw juice, and Cassell's says so plainly: it "will keep for a short time only."
- Glass in direct boiling waterThe jar of fruit stands in a saucepan of boiling water. A thin-walled modern jar or bottle in contact with a hot pan base can crack, and the recipe gives no guidance on protecting or tempering the glass.
- Loaf sugarLoaf or lump sugar was highly refined sugar sold in a cone and broken up as needed; "crushed loaf sugar" is closest to granulated white sugar, measured by weight.
- "A cool place"This means a larder or cellar, cooler than a modern room but well above refrigerator temperature, not a refrigerator. Directions written for that environment carry no useful timing for a modern kitchen at 20C.
- If you want bottled plumsUse a current, tested water-bath canning recipe with stated headspace, jar type, and processing time for your altitude, or simply stone the plums and freeze them — pie fruit freezes well.
Cassell's belongs to the decades when English households were shifting towards glass bottling, but before tested processing times had settled the matter. The tell is the phrase "wide-mouthed glass bottles" with no mention of rubber rings, clamps or a sealing boil: the cook is being taught to hold fruit for a few weeks in a cold larder, not to lay down stores for the winter. Plums invited this treatment because the English glut is short and violent — Victorias and damsons both ripen in late summer — and because a stoned, part-cooked plum is already most of the way to a pie filling. Recipes of this kind sat alongside true preserves in Victorian manuals, and their honesty about keeping qualities is worth noting: the book tells you outright that the results will not last.