Home › The Principles of Cookery › Strawberries, Bottled, for Flavouring Purposes
Strawberries, Bottled, for Flavouring Purposes
Gather the fruit in dry weather, pick it from the bolls, discard any bruised or unsound berries, and allow for it an equal weight of finely-powdered sugar. Fill perfectly dry wide-mouthed bottles with alternate layers of fruit and sugar, and shake them gently to mix them. Cork the bottles closely, and cover the corks with bladder which has been cleaned, dried, and moistened with spirit on the side which is to be next the cork. Store in a cool dry place. The strawberries should be perfectly fresh when they are thus preserved.
This is an unheated, unsterilised preserve sealed with animal membrane and kept at room temperature for months. The method belongs to a period before anyone could measure what was going on inside the bottle, and it does not meet any current standard for shelf-stable fruit.
- No heat step at any pointNothing here is cooked, scalded, or processed after filling. The berries, the bottles and the sugar all carry their own wild yeasts and mould spores, and the recipe relies entirely on sugar and a cork to hold them in check for the rest of the year.
- The sugar is too dilute to preserveEqual weights of fruit and sugar sounds generous, but strawberries are roughly 90 per cent water. Once the juice is drawn out, the syrup settles at something near 45-50 per cent sugar, well under the concentration at which yeasts and osmophilic moulds stop growing. Fermentation and surface mould are the expected outcome, not the exception.
- Corked bottles and gas pressureA tightly corked, membrane-capped bottle of fermenting fruit syrup builds carbon dioxide with nowhere to go. A blown cork or a cracked bottle is a likely outcome on a modern shelf, and glass under pressure is the least of the problem.
- Mould is not skimmable hereThe old habit of lifting off a bloom of mould and using what is underneath does not hold up. Moulds that grow on fruit preserves can push mycotoxins well below the visible surface, and a syrup intended for flavouring uncooked ices and creams gets no further cooking to help.
- Bladder as a seal"Bladder" is cleaned pig or ox bladder, sold by butchers and druggists into the early twentieth century and used as a shrink-fit cap over a cork; the recipe has it moistened with spirit on the side next the cork, presumably to clean the contact point and help it grip. It is hard to come by now, and it was never gas-tight.
- Terms in the textTo "pick it from the bolls" appears to mean pulling the berries off their hulls and green calyces. "Finely-powdered sugar" is closer to caster sugar than to modern icing sugar, which contains anti-caking starch.
- If you want strawberry flavouringUse a current tested recipe for strawberry syrup or preserve, or freeze the sugared fruit. Freezing gives the same purpose, an out-of-season flavouring base, without asking a cork to do the work of a canner.
Bottling fruit purely "for flavouring purposes" was a distinct branch of Victorian storeroom work: the product was not meant for the table as fruit, but to be drawn on in the months when no strawberry could be had. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, compiled for large late-nineteenth-century households, treats such standing stores as routine, and its instructions assume a cool dry larder rather than any form of chilling. The spirit-moistened bladder over the cork is often said to have been a usual closure for anything that had to sit for a season, used for jams, pickles and chemists' preparations alike, and it seems to fade from cookery books as screw-band glass jars and reliable tinned goods took over. The insistence on dry weather, unbruised berries and perfectly dry bottles is the whole of the recipe's safety thinking: keep water and damage out, and trust the sugar.