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Bottled Raspberries
Remove the stems and unsound berries from the fruit, put the fruit into bottles, and pour over sufficient syrup at twenty-six degrees to fill them, place the bottles in a large saucepan with water to half their height, and simmer gently for five minutes. Allow the bottles to cool, pour off all the syrup into a sugar-boiler, and turn the fruit from one bottle into that of another, so as to have two lots in one bottle. Add to the syrup one-fourth of its bulk in raspberry juice, boil up once, skim it well, pour it into the bottles over the fruit, cork them down when cold, and the raspberries are then ready for use.
This is a preserving procedure rather than a dish, and it is the preserving that fails. The notes below explain the archaic terms and why the method does not meet any current standard for putting up fruit.
- Why it fails: the sealThe bottles are corked cold, after the fruit and syrup have been decanted, combined and poured back in open air. A driven cork is not a hermetic seal; it will not hold a vacuum and does nothing to exclude mould, wild yeast or airborne bacteria re-introduced during the transfer.
- Why it fails: the heat processFive minutes at a gentle simmer in a water bath filled to half the bottles' height heats the necks and headspace very little, and the syrup is then poured off and cooled before being boiled up once and returned. No part of the sequence gives a measured hold at a known temperature, so there is no process time to work from.
- Why it fails: the re-handlingTurning the fruit from one bottle into another to consolidate two lots into one is the step that undoes everything before it. Any heat treatment already given is voided the moment the contents are exposed and re-packed.
- Acidity is not a substituteRaspberries are acid enough that Clostridium botulinum is not the main worry here; the realistic outcomes are fermentation, mould growth and blown or weeping bottles in storage. That is still spoiled food, and a cork will let it go quietly for weeks before it shows.
- Use a current methodIf you want bottled raspberries, follow a modern tested water-bath canning recipe with proper two-piece lids, measured headspace and a stated process time for your altitude. Do not adapt the sequence above.
- "Syrup at twenty-six degrees"Almost certainly the Baume scale, read with a syrup hydrometer or saccharometer. Twenty-six degrees Baume is a heavy syrup of roughly 48 percent sugar by weight, well above the medium syrup most modern canning charts call for.
- "Sugar-boiler"An unlined copper pan with a pouring lip, used for sugar work. Copper conducts fast and evenly, which matters when bringing a syrup up once and skimming it; a heavy stainless pan is the modern equivalent.
- The raspberry juice additionAdding a quarter of the syrup's bulk in fresh juice would serve to restore colour and flavour lost to the first heating, since the fruit gives up a good deal of its character to the syrup. The idea is sound even though the preserving around it is not.
Oscar Tschirky, maitre d'hotel of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, put his name to a large 1896 compendium that drew heavily on French professional practice, and this entry shows it: the syrup is specified in degrees Baume rather than cups, the pan is a sugar-boiler, and the whole procedure assumes a kitchen that owns a hydrometer. Bottling fruit in syrup was ordinary hotel work, since a kitchen serving raspberries in February had to have put them up itself the previous summer. The technique of pouring off the syrup, reducing the pack and returning an enriched liquid may owe something to confectionery practice, and seems aimed at colour and clarity on the plate as much as at shelf stability. Home and hotel bottling of this kind stayed common until pressure processing and tested process times were worked out and disseminated in the twentieth century.