Important: Safety Warning
This page recommends preserving food with chemicals such as salicylic acid, borax, or formaldehyde. These substances are toxic when eaten, and their use in food is now prohibited.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Home › The Principles of Cookery › Russian Mode of Preserving Fruit
Russian Mode of Preserving Fruit
A method of preserving fruit, in extensive use in Russia, consists in moistening quicklime with water containing a little creosote, so as to cause it to fall into powder. The fruit is packed in a wooden box, the bottom of which is filled in to the depth of an inch with the lime. The stratum is covered with a sheet of paper, and the fruit laid upon this, each piece by itself, so that no one touches another. A sheet of paper is placed on the top of this layer of fruit and then a second layer of lime is sifted in. In this way lime, paper, and fruit alternately are put in till the box is filled. The corners are then filled with finely-powdered charcoal. By covering the box with a tightly-fitting top, the fruit can, it is said, be kept fresh for at least a year.
This is a storage method rather than a cooking one, and it depends on two substances that have no place near food. It is printed here as a record of how households tried to hold fresh fruit through a winter before mechanical refrigeration.
- Creosote is the disqualifying ingredientNineteenth-century "creosote" meant the phenolic fraction distilled from wood tar, and later, in commerce, coal-tar creosote. Both are volatile, both taint anything porous they sit beside, and coal-tar creosote is a recognised carcinogen. The recipe does not say why it is added, but a volatile antiseptic sealed into a box with fruit will inevitably reach the fruit as vapour.
- Quicklime is caustic, not inertQuicklime is calcium oxide. Slaking it with water is strongly exothermic and throws out a caustic dust that burns eyes, lungs and skin. Even after it has fallen to powder it remains alkaline enough to blister damp skin, and a sheet of paper is not a barrier between it and a plum.
- The paper does nothing usefulThe layers of paper separate the lime from the fruit physically but not chemically. Vapour passes through, moisture wicks, and any fruit that splits or weeps will end up in contact with the lime.
- What the lime was actually forQuicklime scavenges water and carbon dioxide from the air in a sealed container. The intention was a dry space that slowed ripening and mould. The materials chosen to achieve it are not sound.
- A year is not a claim to trustThe text itself hedges with "it is said," and names neither the fruit nor the conditions of storage. Softening, brown core and internal rot are invisible until the fruit is cut.
- If you want to keep fruitUse a current source on cold storage. Firm late-season apples and pears keep for months at just above freezing in high humidity, wrapped individually in plain paper, with no chemicals at all.
Cassell's is often said to have worked partly by scissors and paste, lifting curiosities from trade journals, consular reports and foreign newspapers, which is how a Russian storeroom practice ends up in a London kitchen book. The interest was real: before mechanical refrigeration reached ordinary households, holding apples, pears and grapes from autumn through to spring was a genuine problem, and the period produced an enormous literature of packing media — bran, sawdust, dry sand, wood ash, charcoal, lime. Creosote had been isolated from wood tar in the 1830s and was widely promoted through the middle of the century as a general antiseptic, used on timber, on wounds and, disastrously, on food; the same enthusiasm that put it in this box put salicylic acid in beer and formaldehyde in milk. The reaction came through the pure-food campaigns that produced Britain's Sale of Food and Drugs Act of 1875 and, in the United States, the 1906 Food and Drugs Act, in which chemical preservatives were a central battleground. The warning at the head of this page belongs to that later understanding, not to the book.