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Bottled Pineapple
Peel the rind smoothly and carefully off some pineapples, pick out all the discolored parts, and cut off the heads and stalks. Cut the pines in slices, and pack them closely in wide-mouthed bottles or glass jars; fill each one with syrup boiled to the twenty-six degree; cork them, and tie down. Put the bottles in a saucepan of water, placing straw round them to prevent their knocking together and breaking, and boil them for twenty-five minutes. Then remove from the fire, and leave the bottles in the water until cold, dip the ends in bottle-wax, and store them away for use.
This is a nineteenth-century home-canning method, and the problem is not the fruit but the closure. The notes below explain the archaic terms and why the process itself is no longer considered sound.
- Cork and wax is not a sealA cork pushed into a bottle neck and dipped in wax does not form a hermetic vacuum seal, and there is no way to test whether it held. As the bottle cools, liquid and air can be drawn back past the cork, reintroducing spoilage organisms into fruit that has just been sterilised. Modern practice depends on a two-piece lid or a glass-and-gasket closure that visibly seals under vacuum and visibly fails when it does not.
- No headspace, no ventFruit is to be packed "closely" and each bottle "filled" with syrup. With no measured headspace, the contents expand during the boil and force syrup past the closure, which is exactly how a seal is lost. Current canning procedures specify headspace in fractions of an inch for this reason.
- An unverified process timeTwenty-five minutes in an unspecified saucepan of water, with an unspecified jar size and no requirement that the water cover the jars, is not a validated heat process. Boiling-water processing schedules today are set by jar size, pack style and altitude.
- Bottles in a saucepanThe straw packed round the bottles is doing the job of a canning rack, keeping glass off the pan bottom and away from its neighbours. Even with straw, thin-walled bottles set on direct heat crack readily. If you want home-canned pineapple, follow a current tested boiling-water-bath recipe rather than this one.
- "Syrup boiled to the twenty-six degree"This is almost certainly a reading on the Baume saccharometer, not a temperature. Twenty-six degrees Baume is a medium sugar syrup, in the region of equal parts sugar and water by weight; syrups were specified this way by density rather than by cup measure in confectionery work of the period.
- "Pines"Simply pineapples, the standard shortened form in Victorian and Edwardian cookery writing. The instruction to pick out discoloured parts and cut off head and stalk still applies to any pineapple you prepare fresh.
- Why the fruit itself is not the hazardPineapple is strongly acidic, which is why fruit like this was traditionally bottled at boiling-water temperatures rather than under pressure. The risk in this recipe is spoilage and mould from a closure that cannot be trusted, not the low-acid botulism risk that makes old vegetable and meat canning recipes outright dangerous.
Bottled fruit belongs to an era when fresh pineapple was a luxury import, arriving by steamer from the Caribbean and the Atlantic islands in erratic condition, and a large kitchen that wanted pineapple in February either bought it tinned or put it up itself. The syrup is specified the way a confectioner would specify it, by density on a hydrometer, rather than by a cup measure. Within a generation the industrial canneries of Hawaii, organised on a large scale in the first decades of the twentieth century, had made hand-bottled pineapple an obsolete labour, and instructions like these dropped out of hotel and household books alike.