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To bottle damsons
Put damsons, before they are too ripe, into wide mouthed bottles, and cork them down tight; then put them into a moderately heated oven, and about three hours more will do them; observe that the oven is not too hot, otherwise it will make the fruit fly. All kinds of fruits that are bottled may be done in the same way, and they will keep two years; after they are done, they must be put away with the mouth downward, in a cool place, to keep them from fermenting.
This is oven bottling, a preserving method that predates any understanding of what actually makes a sealed jar safe. The instructions cannot be brought up to a modern standard by adjusting the temperature or the time, so the points below explain where the method breaks down rather than how to repair it.
- Corks are not a sealA cork driven into a bottle neck holds against liquid but not against air over months, and it cannot form the vacuum that keeps a preserve sterile. Storing the bottles mouth-down, as the recipe directs, would put the fruit's own juice against the cork, which may have been intended to compensate for an imperfect closure.
- Oven canning is not recognised as safeDry oven heat transfers into a bottle of fruit slowly and unevenly, so the contents may sit for a long stretch at spoilage-friendly temperatures without ever reaching a reliable processing temperature throughout. No current food-safety authority endorses processing jars in an oven for any food.
- "Moderately heated" is unmeasurable hereLater cookery references gloss a moderate oven at somewhere around 300-350F, but the term was never precise and the book gives no way to check it. The warning that the oven must not be so hot as to "make the fruit fly" suggests a fear of the fruit or bottles bursting, but either way it gives the cook no way to know the fruit reached any particular temperature.
- Glass under pressureSealed, corked bottles heated in an oven build internal pressure with no vent. Modern jars are designed to release air past the lid during processing; a tightly corked bottle simply fails, sometimes violently.
- Two years of storageDamsons are acidic enough that Clostridium botulinum is not the main worry, but yeasts and moulds are, and a leaking cork admits both. Fruit stored this way ferments, and the recipe's advice on preventing fermentation is a hope rather than a control.
- If you want bottled damsonsUse a current, tested water-bath canning recipe with two-piece lids, measured processing times for your jar size and altitude, and a check that each lid has sealed. Damsons in syrup or damson jam are both well covered by modern preserving guides.
- What the fruit itself tells youChoosing damsons "before they are too ripe" is sound and still worth borrowing: underripe damsons are higher in pectin and acid and hold their shape better in a jar.
Damsons are small, tart, blue-black plums of the Prunus domestica group whose name comes through Middle English from the Latin damascenum, the plum of Damascus, and the fruit has long been grown in English hedgerows and orchards where dessert plums would sulk. Oven bottling of the kind described here was widespread in British household books of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, before Nicolas Appert's sealed-and-boiled method and the later glass jar with a rubber ring and screw band reached domestic kitchens. The instruction to store the bottles upside down in a cool place appears to be a period technique rather than a quirk of this book.