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Raspberries, Preserved
Those who grow raspberries in large quantities will do well to gather them before they are fully ripe, and bottle without boiling them, according to the recipe already given (see RASPBERRIES, BOTTLED, WITHOUT BOILING). It will be found that four ounces of sugar will be sufficient for one of the wide-mouthed bottles ordinarily used.
This is a supplementary note rather than a standalone method: it points back to an earlier entry for bottling raspberries without boiling and adds a sugar quantity. The technique it describes is unpasteurised bottling, which no current preserving authority accepts.
- No heat process at allThe whole point of the referenced method is that the fruit is never boiled. Nothing in the jar is brought to a temperature that kills yeasts, moulds or bacterial spores, and nothing drives out the air that lets them grow.
- A sealed jar is the problem, not the solutionSugared fruit sealed cold in a wide-mouthed bottle creates exactly the low-oxygen environment that favours spoilage organisms. Raspberries are acidic enough to discourage Clostridium botulinum, but the seal may be imperfect and the fruit diluted with juice — and fermentation and mould growth are the likely outcome.
- Four ounces of sugar is not a preservativeFour ounces of sugar to a bottle of fruit (the recipe does not say what the bottle holds) gives a syrup far too dilute to preserve by osmotic pressure. Jam relies on something close to equal weights of sugar and fruit plus a boil; this is a sweetened fruit, not a preserve.
- The vessel has changedThe recipe says only "the wide-mouthed bottles ordinarily used", and gives no capacity or closure. Whatever was meant, a nineteenth-century domestic bottle closure will not produce the reliable vacuum of a modern two-piece canning lid, and this recipe assumes no vacuum is needed.
- Underripe fruitGathering the berries before full ripeness was sound practice for structure and pectin — the fruit holds its shape and sets better. It does nothing for safety.
- What to do insteadUse a current tested recipe for bottled or canned raspberries, raspberry jam, or freeze the fruit. Do not attempt any unheated sealed-jar method.
Cassell's was written for households with gardens, and a raspberry crop arrives all at once in a week or two of high summer — hence the assumption that the reader is dealing with "large quantities" and needs somewhere to put them. Bottling fruit cold, with or without a little sugar, is often said to have been a common recourse in nineteenth-century British kitchens, and the promise of fruit that tasted fresh rather than cooked was a real attraction before domestic freezing existed. The scientific case for heat processing was made through the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and only slowly displaced these older cold methods in domestic manuals; a book of this vintage can still print one without comment. The instruction to pick before full ripeness is the enduringly useful part — slightly underripe raspberries carry more pectin and collapse less, which is why jam-makers still favour them.