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Fritters, Omelettes, Pancakes, Recipes for
Directions for making the following appear under their respective headings :- Apple Fritters.
Beef Fritters.
Bread and Butter- Fritters.
Currant Fritters.
Indian Fritters.
Orange Fritters.
Pea Fritters.
Peach Fritters.
Pine-apple Fritters.
Plain Fritters.
Potato Fritters.
Rice Fritters.
Bachelor's Omelette.
Ham Omelette.
Kidney Omelette.
Plain Omelette.
Plain SweetOmelette Sweet Omelette.
French Pancakes.
Indian Pancakes.
Snow Pancakes.
FRUIT, TO BOTTLE.
Fruit, to Bottle Fresh. (Very Useful in Winter.) - INGREDIENTS.-Fresh fruits, such as currants, raspberries, cherries, gooseberries, plums of all kinds, damsons, &c.; wide-mouthed glass bottles, new corks to fit them tightly.
Let the fruit be full grown, but not too ripe, and gathered in dry weather. Pick it off the stalks without bruising or breaking the skin, and reject any that is at all blemished; if gathered in the damp, or if the skins are cut at all, the fruit will mould.
Have ready some perfectly dry glass bottles, and some nice new soft corks or bungs; burn a match in each bottle to exhaust the air, and quickly place the fruit in to be preserved; gently cork the bottles, and put them in a very cool oven, where let them remain until the fruit has shrunk away a fourth part. Then take the bottles out; do not open them, but immediately beat the corks in tight, cut off the tops, and cover them with melted resin. If kept in a dry place the fruit will remain good for months; and on this principally depends the success of the preparation; for if stored away in a place that is in the least damp, the fruit will soon spoil.
TIME. From 5 to 6 hours in a very slow oven.
The opening lines here are a cross-reference list from the book's index, pointing to fritter, omelette and pancake recipes printed elsewhere. The actual instructions on this page are for bottling fresh fruit, and that method has been superseded for good reason.
- Oven canning is the problemHeating sealed jars in dry oven air is the one technique modern preserving authorities single out as unsafe and unreliable. Air is a poor conductor, so the contents heat slowly and unevenly, the centre of the bottle may never reach a temperature that destroys yeasts and moulds, and glass under internal pressure in a hot dry oven can fail violently.
- No measured temperature or time you can act onPeriod oven descriptions such as "a very slow oven" were never standardised, though they are usually reckoned at somewhere around 200-250F; in any case the recipe's real endpoint is visual, the fruit shrinking by a quarter, which tells you nothing about whether the interior was ever pasteurised. Safe fruit processing is defined by a measured water-bath time at a known temperature, adjusted for altitude and jar size.
- Cork and resin is not a sealA driven cork topped with melted resin gives a mechanical plug, not the vacuum seal produced by a modern two-piece lid. Corks are porous, resin cracks with temperature swings, and there is no way to check afterwards whether the closure held. The recipe's own warning that damp storage will spoil the fruit is an admission that the seal is permeable.
- The burning matchThe recipe gives the match's purpose as exhausting the air, and a sulphur match of the period would also have left some sulphur dioxide behind, a substance valued elsewhere as a fruit preservative. Neither effect is reliable at this scale, and any SO2 produced is unmeasured. Commercial sulphuring of fruit is a controlled process with declared residue limits.
- Mould is not merely spoilageThe text treats moulded fruit as a cosmetic failure to be avoided by careful picking. Moulds growing in under-processed fruit can produce mycotoxins such as patulin, which are not removed by scraping off the visible growth.
- What the fruit list does tell youCurrants, raspberries, cherries, gooseberries, plums and damsons are all high-acid fruits, which is why this method worked often enough to be printed. Acidity suppresses Clostridium botulinum; it does not suppress the yeasts and moulds that spoil badly sealed bottles.
- If you want to bottle fruitUse a current tested recipe from a national food-preservation authority, with a water-bath canner, proper jars and lids, and the processing time specified for your fruit and jar size.
Bottling fruit in glass is generally traced to Nicolas Appert, whose sealed-and-heated preserving method was published in France in 1810. By Mrs Beeton's day the technique was well established, and the phrase attached to this entry, "very useful in winter", is the whole point of it: before reliable commercial canning and long before domestic freezers, a shelf of bottled damsons was the difference between fruit on the table in February and none. The reliance on a burnt match, a driven cork and a coat of resin shows the period's grasp of the principle, exclude air and heat the contents, running well ahead of any means of verifying that either had actually been achieved. The list of fritters, omelettes and pancakes above it is simply the alphabetical index turning a corner from F for Fritters to F for Fruit.