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Corks
Scald bottles and fill with the cleared juice to within 1/2 inches of the mouth.
Close with corks which have been boiled in water for ten minutes and tie down corks with string. Ordinary preserving jars may also be used. Seal the jars after filling.
This is the bottling step from a longer sequence on putting up fruit juice, and on its own it omits every control that makes home preserving safe. Read it as a record of how juice was bottled around 1900, not as a working method.
- No heat processing at allThe instruction stops at filling, corking and tying down. There is no boiling-water bath, no processing time and no temperature for the juice itself, so nothing in the procedure destroys the yeasts, moulds and bacteria already present in the fruit or introduced during straining and pouring.
- A scalded bottle is not a sterile bottleScalding rinses and heats the glass briefly; it does not hold it at a temperature long enough to matter, and the bottle cools while being filled. The same applies to corks boiled for ten minutes — cork is porous and recontaminates the moment it is handled.
- Corks and string are not a sealA tied cork chiefly stops the cork itself being pushed out; it is not a barrier that reliably keeps air and microorganisms from working in. Juice held this way is very likely to ferment or mould.
- "Seal the jars after filling" is not a methodModern preserving jars need a measured processing time appropriate to the acidity of the contents and the jar size, followed by a checked vacuum seal. The bare word "seal" here carries none of that, and a lid pressed onto unprocessed juice simply traps a warm growth medium.
- The headspace figure is the one usable detail'within 1/2 inches of the mouth' reads as a half-inch headspace, the one instruction on the page that a current method would recognise as an instruction of the same kind, though modern procedures for juice specify a smaller allowance.
- Use a current method insteadIf you want to put up fruit juice, follow an up-to-date tested procedure with stated fill temperatures, processing times and jar sizes. Do not adapt this text.
Fruit-juice bottling entries like this one belong to a period when the cork-and-string bottle and the screw-top or clamp preserving jar were both in domestic use, which may explain the abrupt 'ordinary preserving jars may also be used' tacked onto the end. The reference to 'cleared juice' points back to an earlier stage of the process, in which pressed fruit juice was left to settle or strained so the bottled liquid would be bright rather than cloudy. Boiling the corks was common advice and was understood as a cleansing measure, at a time when the germ theory of spoilage was still working its way unevenly into domestic manuals.