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Bottled Greengages
Select greengages that are not too ripe. make small holes all over them, put them in wide-mouthed bottles, fill the bottles with thin syrup, cork and tie down; place them in a saucepan of water, bring it gently to the boil, and simmer until the fruit turns brown. Remove from the fire, leave the bottles in the water for a day, boil again for ten minutes, and the fruit is ready for use.
This is a home-preserving procedure, not a dish, and it is the kind of preserving that current practice has abandoned. The notes below explain what the original assumes and where it breaks down.
- The seal is the problemA cork tied down with string is a pressure-release valve, not a hermetic closure. It vents during heating and then draws air, and whatever is on the cork, back into the bottle as the contents cool. Nothing about the process establishes a vacuum that can be verified.
- No measured process"Simmer until the fruit turns brown" is a colour cue, not a time or a temperature, and the colour of the fruit does not tell you what temperature has been reached at the centre of the bottle. Modern fruit canning is specified in minutes at a stated jar size and altitude for exactly this reason.
- The second boil does not fix the firstBoiling again after a day in the water is an intermittent or "tyndallisation" method that older books trusted to catch anything that germinated overnight. It is not accepted now, and with a cork closure that may well have vented, repeated heating turns the fruit to mush without guaranteeing anything.
- "Thin syrup" is undefinedPeriod books differ considerably on what thin syrup means, and this one gives no ratio at all. At any of the usual strengths, sugar is a texture and flavour choice, not a preservative, and it contributes nothing to safety here.
- Acidity is not the whole storyGreengages are acid enough that botulism is not the primary concern, which is why plums can be water-bath processed at all. The realistic failures are mould and yeast spoilage from an unsealed bottle, and a sealed-looking bottle that is not actually sealed is the worst case of all.
- Pricking the fruitThe small holes all over are there to stop the skins bursting and to let syrup penetrate, which is sound and still done. It is the only part of the method that has survived unchanged.
- If you want bottled greengagesUse a current tested recipe with jars, two-piece lids, a stated processing time and a checked seal. Do not adapt the timings above.
The greengage is the plum the French call Reine Claude, after Claude of France, and the English name is traditionally traced to Sir William Gage, whose family is said to have brought the trees into England in the early eighteenth century; the story is repeated everywhere and documented nowhere very firmly. It is a short-season fruit, green-gold, honey-sweet and gone by early autumn, which is precisely why a kitchen would want it bottled.