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Bottled Plums
Select the required quantity of plums, prick them all over and drop them into a preserving-pan with some syrup of thirty-two degrees just removed from the fire; when the plums are all in, put the pan on a hot screen or over a charcoal fire, until the syrup has become quite hot, then take out the plums carefully, put them in a basin, and let them remain there for twenty-four hours or so; then put them into wide-mouthed bottles and boil up the syrup again, skim it thoroughly and when it has become nearly cold, pour it into the bottles over the plums; cork the bottles, tie down well, and place them in a saucepan with water to the beginning of the necks of the bottles, boil for quarter of an hour, and when cold, they are ready for use.
This is a French confectioner's bottling method transcribed into an American hotel book, and it depends on vessels and assumptions that no longer hold. The reading notes below explain the terms and then why the preserving method itself is unsound by current standards.
- Syrup of thirty-two degreesThe number is degrees Baume, read with a syrup hydrometer, not a temperature. Thirty-two Baume is a heavy syrup, in the region of three parts sugar to two parts water by weight, a standard strength for fruit bottling in nineteenth-century French practice.
- Hot screen and charcoal fireBoth indicate a source of gentle, even heat rather than a direct flame, though the exact fitting meant by 'screen' is not certain. The intent is that the plums themselves are never boiled; they are held below simmering so the skins stay whole and the flesh does not collapse.
- The prickingPlums are pricked all over so the syrup can penetrate and the skins do not split from steam pressure. The twenty-four-hour rest in the basin is an osmosis step, letting sugar move into the fruit and water move out before the final bottling.
- Corked and tied downThis is the failure point. A driven cork secured with string or wired parchment was the standard closure of the period, and it does not produce a reliable hermetic seal. Modern preserving depends on a lid that seats under vacuum and can be verified as sealed; a cork gives no such indication and can weep or lift as the bottle cools.
- No measurements, no verificationThere is no weight of fruit, no volume of syrup, no headspace, no jar size and no processing time keyed to any of these. Safe fruit canning schedules are specific to all of them. Fifteen minutes in a saucepan of water reaching only to the necks of the bottles is not a controlled process and leaves the upper contents unheated.
- Cold syrup into the bottlesPouring nearly cold syrup over the fruit and then processing briefly means the interior of a packed bottle may never come to the temperature that the short boil implies. Contamination introduced during the twenty-four-hour open rest in a basin has had a full day at room temperature to establish itself.
- What to do insteadPlums are acid enough to be safely water-bath canned, but only by a current tested schedule with proper two-piece lids and jars, a measured processing time for the jar size and altitude, and a checked seal. Use one of those rather than this text.
Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book of 1896 was assembled by the maitre d'hotel of the Waldorf from the working practice of a professional hotel kitchen, and much of its preserving and confectionery material is straight French technique of the sort a European-trained pastry department would have used daily. The giveaway here is the syrup measured in degrees rather than cups: Baume's hydrometer scale, generally traced to the French chemist Antoine Baume in the eighteenth century, was the confectioner's standard tool for judging sugar density long before household thermometers were common, and recipes written for professionals simply named the degree and expected the reader to own the instrument. Bottling fruit in heavy syrup under cork was how a large kitchen carried summer plums into winter service; the twenty-four-hour steeping and the deliberate avoidance of a hard boil are both aimed at the same end, which is getting a whole, unbroken plum onto a plate in February.