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Raspberries, Bottled, Without Boiling
Choose freshly-gathered and perfectly dry raspberries. Pick and weigh them, and take their weight in finely-powdered white sugar. Bruise them slightly, and fill dry wide-necked bottles with layers of fruit and sugar in equal quantities. Cork the bottles immediately, and cover the corks with bladder which has been moistened with spirits of wine. Store in a very cool, airy situation, or the fruit may ferment.
This is a cold-pack preserve with no heat step at any point, sealed with materials no longer available. The reasons it cannot be reproduced are worth understanding, but a current tested recipe for raspberry preserve or freezer jam should be used instead.
- No heat, no sealNothing here is sterilised: the fruit, the sugar and the bottle all carry their own yeasts and moulds, and the cork shuts them into a wet, sugary environment. The recipe's own closing line — "or the fruit may ferment" — shows the writer knew the method could fail.
- Fermentation in a corked bottleWild yeasts feeding on that much sugar generate carbon dioxide with nowhere to go. A tightly corked, bladder-capped bottle can push its cork or break.
- Surface mould is not skimmableMoulds that colonise high-sugar fruit preserves can produce mycotoxins that spread well below the visible growth, so a spoiled bottle cannot be rescued by lifting off the top layer.
- Bladder and spirits of wineBladder is dried animal membrane, sold by chemists and grocers into the early twentieth century as a wrapping that shrinks tight as it dries; spirits of wine is rectified ethyl alcohol, used here to moisten the membrane so it can be worked over the cork. Neither is a kitchen material today, and neither produces a hermetic seal by modern standards.
- Sugar ratioEqual weights of fruit and sugar is the classic preserving proportion and is high enough to inhibit some spoilage, but sugar alone does not sterilise, and it does nothing about what is already living on the berries.
- "Finely-powdered white sugar"Sugar crushed and sieved fine, whether at home from a loaf or bought already milled; closer to modern caster than to icing sugar, which contains anti-caking starch.
- The storage instruction was the whole defence"A very cool, airy situation" meant a stone larder or cellar, far cooler than a modern kitchen cupboard. The recipe gives no keeping time at all.
Cassell's belongs to the last generation of British cookery books written before reliable home canning: the screw-band and rubber-ring jar is generally traced to a United States patent of the late 1850s but took decades to reach the average British kitchen, and until then fruit was kept in wide-necked glass bottles closed with cork and covered with bladder, leather or several layers of paper pasted down. "Without boiling" is the selling point: raspberries lose their perfume when cooked, so cooks tried to keep them raw under a blanket of sugar, relying on the sugar's water-binding power and on a genuinely cold larder rather than on any sterilisation. Spirits of wine, simply rectified alcohol, was a standard household chemical of the period and appears throughout Victorian preserving instructions for wetting bladder covers and for dabbing over the surface of jams.