Home › The Principles of Cookery › RASPBERRIES, BOTTLED (for winter Tarts, Creams, or Ices)
RASPBERRIES, BOTTLED (for winter Tarts, Creams, or Ices)
Pick the raspberries carefully without bruising them, and look into each one to see that no little insects are lurking in the heart of the fruit. Put the raspberries into clean dry widemouthed bottles, and cover them with syrup made by boiling, till clear, three pounds of sugar with a quart of water which has been whisked up with a tea-spoonful of the white of an egg. Cork the bottles down tightly, and tie the corks with string. Place them carefully in a large saucepan with cold water to reach up to their necks. Put the saucepan on the fire, and bring the water to the boiling point. Draw it to the side of the fire, and let it simmer gently for ten minutes, lift it down, and let the bottles remain untouched till the water is cold. Examine the corks, and if necessary tie them down again, cover with wax, and store for use. In order to prevent the bottles cracking in the water, it will be a wise precaution to wrap a band of straw round each one. Probable cost of raspberries, 2d. to 6d. per pint.
This is a nineteenth-century water-bath bottling method, and the sealing system it depends on is the part that no longer passes muster. The syrup and the fruit are fine; the cork is not.
- A corked bottle does not sealModern fruit bottling relies on a lid that is drawn down by the vacuum formed as the contents cool, giving a seal that can be tested afterwards. A cork tied with string and dipped in wax gives no vacuum and no way to verify closure, so spoilage organisms can enter as the jars cool and again during months of storage — with no visible sign until the bottle is opened.
- The heating is unmeasuredThe instruction is to bring the pan to the boil, draw it aside and simmer ten minutes, with the water only up to the necks of the bottles. Nothing here fixes the temperature reached at the centre of the fruit or the time it is held there, which is the whole basis of safe preserving. The headspace and the upper fruit are the least heated part of the bottle and the most likely to spoil.
- Tightly corked bottles under heatThe bottles are corked and tied shut before they go into the pan, so the contents expand against a fixed closure and the cork can be forced out. The recipe's own straw band shows breakage was expected; glass in a heated pan is also at risk from thermal shock and from knocking against the pan and its neighbours.
- Raspberries are acid, but that is not the whole storyThe acidity of raspberries makes botulism an unlikely hazard in properly sealed fruit, so the risk here is chiefly yeasts, moulds and fermentation rather than a toxin. Some storage moulds on fruit do produce mycotoxins, and a bottle that has quietly fermented for a season is not salvageable by boiling.
- If you want bottled raspberriesUse a current tested recipe for water-bath canning fruit in syrup, with proper two-piece lids, stated processing times for your jar size and altitude, and a seal check before storage. Do not adapt the method above to modern jars by guesswork.
- On the syrup, for referenceThree pounds of sugar to a quart (an imperial quart is 40 fl oz, about 4 3/4 US cups) is a very heavy syrup, somewhere around 55 per cent sugar by weight. The teaspoon of egg white whisked into the water is a clarifying agent: the albumen coagulates as the syrup heats and carries scum to the surface to be skimmed, which is why the syrup is boiled "till clear".
- What "2d. to 6d. per pint" tells youCassell's quoted costs in pre-decimal pence, and the wide range reflects how sharply soft-fruit prices fell at the height of a short English season. The whole point of bottling was to capture that glut.
Bottling fruit in syrup in corked glass belongs to the long line of descent from Nicolas Appert, the French confectioner whose 1810 treatise established that food sealed in glass and heated in a water bath would keep — decades before anyone understood why. Appert's own vessels were corked and wired, close to though not exactly the method described here, and English household manuals repeated the technique through the century even after screw-topped and clip-topped preserving jars became available in the second half of the century. The recipe's purpose is stated in its title: raspberries have a season of a few weeks, and tarts, creams and ices were wanted all year, so a Victorian kitchen bottled the fruit whole rather than reducing it all to jam. The instruction to look into the heart of each berry for insects is not fussiness but experience; the raspberry beetle larva sits in the hollow core, and a bruised or infested berry ferments the whole bottle.