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Fruit, to Bottle Fresh
INGREDIENTS. Any kind of fresh fruit, such as currants, cherries, gooseberries, all kinds of plums &c.; wide-mouthed glass bottles, new corks to fit them tightly.
Any kind of fresh fruit, such as currants, cherries, gooseberries, all kinds of plums &c.;. The fruit must be full-grown, not too ripe, and gathered on a very fine day. Let it be carefully picked and put into the bottles, which must be clean and perfectly dry. Tie over the tops of the bottles pieces of bladder; stand the bottles in a large pot, copper or boiler, with cold water to reach to their necks: kindle a fire under, let the water boil, and as the bladders begin to rise and puff, prick them. As soon as the water boils, extinguish the fire, and let the bottles remain where they are, to become cold. The next day remove the bladders, and strew over the fruit a thick layer of pounded sugar; fit the bottles with cork, and let the cork lie close at hand to its own bottle. Hold for a few moments, in the neck of the bottle, two or three lighted matches, and when they have filled the bottle neck with gas, and before they go out, remove them very quickly; instantly cork the bottles closely, and dip it in bottlecement. TIME. Altogether about 8 hours.
FRYING.
Fruit, to Bottle Fresh, with Sugar. (Very Useful in Winter.) -INGREDIENTS.-Any kind of fresh fruit; to each quart bottle allow lb. of pounded sugar.
Let the fruit be gathered in dry weather.
Pick it carefully, and drop it into clean and very dry quart glass bottles, sprinkling over it the above proportion of pounded sugar to each quart. Put the corks in the bottles, and place them in a copper of cold water up to their necks, with small hay whisps round them, to prevent the bottles from knocking together. Light the fire under, bring the water gradually to boil, and let it simmer gently until the fruit in the bottles is reduced nearly one third. Extinguish the fire, and let the bottles remain in the water until it is perfectly cold; then take them out, make the corks secure, and cover them with melted resin or wax.
TIME. About hour from the time the water commences to boil.
Note. Unless for those possessing very large gardens and a quantity of fruit, it is cheaper and safer to buy it ready bottled. George Whybrow's is one of the best brands.
Fruit Turnovers (suitable for Picnics).
INGREDIENTS. - Puff-paste, any kind of fruit, sugar to taste.
Make some puff-paste by recipe; roll it out to the thickness of about 1/4 inch, and cut it out in pieces of a circular form; pile the fruit on half of the paste, sprinkle over some sugar, wet the edges and turn the paste over. Press the edges together, ornament them, and brush the turnovers over with the white of an egg; sprinkle over sifted sugar, and bake on tins, in a brisk oven for about 20 minutes. Instead of putting the fruit in raw, it may be boiled down with a little sugar first, and then inclosed in the crust; or jam of any kind, may be substituted for fresh fruit.
TIME.-20 minutes.
SEASONABLE at any time.
This is a Victorian method of preserving fruit in corked bottles, and it does not meet any modern standard for home canning. The notes below explain what the instructions involve and where the method breaks down.
- The seal is the problemA cork dipped in cement, resin or wax is not a reliable hermetic seal, and neither is a pig's bladder tied over the neck. Preserving jars with a two-piece lid or a rubber-gasketed clamp seal were developed to give a more dependable seal than cork.
- The heat process is unmeasuredThe heat process is barely measured -- In the first version the fruit is brought to a boil and then simply left to go cold in the water. The second gives only a rough simmering period and a visual cue (fruit reduced by nearly a third). There is no measurement of jar contents and no allowance for jar size or fruit density, where safe fruit canning depends on a specified minutes-at-temperature figure for a specified pack.
- Burning matches in the bottle neckThe "gas" from the lighted matches was most likely sulphur dioxide from the sulphur in the match head, together with the consumption of oxygen in the neck of the bottle; sulphur fumigation was a recognised preservative practice. Deliberately generating sulphur dioxide into food is not a domestic technique today.
- Glass in direct heatBottles stood in a copper over a kindled fire, filled with water only to the neck, are being heated unevenly from below. The hay wisps in the second version are there to stop the bottles knocking together.
- Archaic vessels and termsA "copper" or "boiler" is the large laundry cauldron used for washing. "Pounded sugar" is loaf or lump sugar broken down in a mortar; caster sugar is the nearest equivalent. "Bladder" is a cleaned animal bladder used as a flexible cover before greaseproof paper and cellophane.
- If you want bottled fruitUse a current tested recipe from a food-safety authority or a modern preserving manual, which will give you a jar type, a headspace, a syrup strength and a processing time in minutes for your altitude.
- The turnovers are still usableThe third entry on this page is an ordinary fruit turnover and carries none of the above problems. A "brisk oven" for puff pastry means about 425F; twenty minutes is realistic for a small turnover, and the egg-white-and-sugar glaze gives the crisp sugared top.
Bottling fruit was one of the great domestic preoccupations of the nineteenth century, sitting between the older techniques of drying and sugar-preserving and the industrial canning that eventually displaced both. Nicolas Appert's demonstration in the first decade of the 1800s that food sealed in glass and heated would keep is generally credited as the origin of the method, and it spread through English household manuals long before anyone understood why it worked. What is striking here is the note appended to the second version: unless you have a very large garden and a glut of fruit, it is cheaper and safer to buy it ready bottled, with a commercial brand named outright. That aside marks a real shift in the later editions of Beeton, which by then were being revised well after Isabella Beeton's death in 1865. The advice is no longer purely how to do everything yourself, but when to let the factory do it, and the frank admission that the home process was the riskier one is worth noticing.