Important: Safety Warning
This page describes home-canning methods from before the causes of botulism were understood. Canning low-acid foods without a pressure canner, as described here, can allow the growth of Clostridium botulinum, whose toxin is among the deadliest known. Follow current USDA home-canning guidelines instead.
In addition, this page recommends preserving food with chemicals such as salicylic acid, borax, or formaldehyde. These substances are toxic when eaten, and their use in food is now prohibited.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Bottled Fruits
For every pound of fruit allow six ounces of coarsely crushed loaf sugar and half a teacupful of water. Prepare the fruit by removing the stalks, etc., put it into a pan with the sugar and water, and boil it over a slow fire for ten minutes. Warm some wide-mouthed glass bottles near the fire, then dip a thin stick in sulphur, light it, and hold a bottle mouth downwards over it, The bottle will become full of smoke, and by this means all the air in it will be exhausted. Fill the bottles at once with the fruit, smoking each bottle first and then filling it. Cork the bottle air-tight and place in a dry cupboard.
This is a Victorian bottling method that survived into early hotel kitchens, and it fails on every count that modern preserving science cares about. The notes below explain the terms and then why the process cannot be trusted.
- Loaf sugarSugar was sold in hard cones that were broken up and crushed at home; "coarsely crushed loaf sugar" is simply granulated white sugar by weight. Six ounces to the pound of fruit is a light syrup by preserving standards, which is part of the problem below.
- A teacupfulA genuinely loose measure. Period books reckon it variously at about four to six fluid ounces, so half a teacupful is somewhere between two and three fluid ounces (roughly four to six tablespoons). No two contemporary authors agree exactly.
- The sulphur step is the fatal flawBurning a sulphur-dipped stick in a bottle produces sulphur dioxide; it does not "exhaust the air" and it does not sterilise the glass. The gas inhibits some moulds and yeasts at best, and it leaves a residue of an ingredient that is now a declarable allergen. It also means breathing sulphur dioxide over an open flame in a closed kitchen.
- No heat processing after sealingThe fruit is boiled ten minutes in the pan, then transferred to warm bottles and corked. Nothing brings the sealed container up to temperature, so any organism introduced during filling survives and multiplies in a light syrup at cupboard temperature.
- Corks are not an airtight sealA cork in a wide-mouthed bottle cannot hold a vacuum and cannot be verified. Modern preserving depends on a seal that visibly proves itself; this one gives no signal at all when it has failed.
- Fruit type is not specifiedThe recipe covers 'fruit' indiscriminately. High-acid fruits such as plums and currants are relatively forgiving; figs sit above pH 4.6, and pears and sweet cherries can approach that borderline, where Clostridium botulinum may grow in an anaerobic sealed jar. Without acidification and measured processing there is no way to know which case you are in.
- If you want bottled fruitUse a current, tested water-bath canning recipe with stated jar sizes, headspace and processing times. This page is worth reading as a document, not as a procedure.
Sulphur fumigation is one of the oldest preserving tricks in the European kitchen: winemakers were burning sulphur candles in casks long before anyone understood microbes, and the practice migrated to fruit bottling and to the drying of apples and apricots, which is why commercial dried fruit still carries a sulphite declaration. Recipes of this shape circulated widely in nineteenth-century English household manuals and were copied forward into later compilations. It sits in the book at the moment when the sealed glass jar with a rubber ring -- the Mason jar was patented in the United States in 1858 -- was making the corked-and-smoked bottle obsolete; in the decades that followed, home canning instruction moved to the agricultural extension services and their measured times and temperatures.