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Preserved Fruits (Lb of fruit add a teaspoonful)
¼ lb. of fruit add a teaspoonful of honey.
Serve in a trifle dish, and cover with plain cream. (Cranberry juice is a febrifuge.) Cranberries Preserved.
To preserve cranberries you require 1 lb. of sugar to each lb. of berries; cook on till the juice jellies; add cranberry juice if it seems dry. Cranberries will keep good till the new season's fruit is in. Cranberries (Russian Way to Preserve).
Russian cranberries must be drained from the water they come in. They require an equal weight of sugar. Put the fruit in a preserving pan with a little water (a cupful to 12 lbs.). Add the sugar, and put them on to boil for 20 minutes. Put the fruit loosely into jars and do not paper the jars till cool. Cranberries - To Bottle. (Mrs. Young.) Fill each bottle half up with water (if possible taken from a stream on the moor where the cranberries grow), then put in as many freshly - gathered good cranberries as it will hold. Tie over it a bladder, or cork close, and keep the bottles in a cool place. For another Cranberry recipe see Mrs. Farquharson's recipe for Cranberries, under Sweet Dishes.
Damsons - to Bottle (Caldy Manor Recipe. 1886.) To every quart of damsons add 2 tablespoonfuls of pounded white sugar, tie down tightly, put into a cool oven after bread - making; next day tie down with bladder; put in a cupboard, as, to make them keep well, the air must be carefully excluded. Gooseberries. (As bottled at Trebah. 1880.) Fill bottles - such as are used by confectioners - with the fruit, and place the bottles in a fish kettle with cold water, and a little hay to keep them steady. The fish kettle ought to be nearly full of water when the bottles are in it. Let it come to the boil and continue boiling for 20 minutes. Have a kettle ready with boiling water, and fill up each bottle with boiling water as you take it out, and instantly tie it down with a bladder it requires two persons to do this, one to pour in the water, the other to tie down the bladder quickly. If the bladder becomes concave as the water cools, the fruit will keep well for a year.
Plums can be bottled in the same way. "Mismash." See Apricots.
Pears. See recipe for Pears Stewed, No. 1, under Sweet Dishes. Pineapple Preserved.
Have 1 pineapple, pared and sliced, also 1 lb. of sugar to each lb. of fruit, ½ pt. of water to each lb. of sugar. Boil the water, sugar and pineapple parings together; strain off the syrup and put it to the sliced pine; give them one boil, and let the slices stand one day in the syrup. Next day strain off the syrup again, boil it up, and pour again over the sliced pineapple to stand another day. Repeat this process the third day. It is then complete.
The following recipe for fruit for creams or dessert is similar: - Ingredients: The pineapples pared and cut into rather thick slices; and equal weight of sugar.
Lay the slices in a bowl and grate half the sugar over them, letting it stand till the next day.
This is a run of separate preserving notes gathered under one heading, and they divide sharply: the sugar-heavy cranberry and pineapple preserves are recognisable confectionery, while the bottling instructions belong to a pre-thermometer era of home preserving that no current authority would endorse. The notes below explain the vocabulary and the specific problems.
- The bladder seal is the core failureA pig or sheep bladder, soaked and tied over the bottle mouth, was the standard cover. The Trebah note treats a concave bladder as the test of a good seal — the membrane drawn in as the contents cool. It is a membrane cover, not a hermetic closure, and it neither guarantees nor maintains a vacuum. Nothing in these recipes establishes a verified seal.
- "A cool oven after bread-making" is not a temperatureThe damson method relies on residual heat in a cooling brick oven, and the book gives no figure; how hot the jars ever got depended entirely on how long the bread had been out. There is no way to know whether the fruit reached a temperature that mattered, and the bladder is only tied on the following day.
- Twenty minutes in a fish kettle is not a processing timeThe gooseberry method puts unsealed bottles in cold water, brings it to the boil, then tops them up from a separate kettle and seals them in the open air. Processing times for fruit are calculated for sealed jars, by jar size and altitude; an open bottle refilled on the bench and covered with a membrane is a different operation entirely. The hay is simply padding to stop the glass knocking.
- Stream water and unsterilised fruitMrs Young's cranberries are raw berries covered with untreated moorland water, corked or tied with a bladder, and left in a cool place — no heat at any stage. Surface water carries Cryptosporidium, Giardia and faecal bacteria. Yeasts and moulds will also work on it; mould growth on fruit preserves raises the pH locally and can open the door to organisms the acidity was supposed to exclude.
- Why the acidity does not rescue itCranberries, damsons and gooseberries are all high-acid fruits, which is why these methods often worked. But "often worked" is not the standard for anaerobic storage in glass under an unmeasured seal, and spoilage in these jars is frequently silent before it is visible. Use a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority if you want to bottle fruit.
- The sugar preserves are a different caseThe cranberry preserve (1 lb sugar to 1 lb fruit, boiled until the juice jellies) and the three-day pineapple candying are ordinary high-sugar confectionery, and the problem there is only the storage instruction: "do not paper the jars till cool" refers to covering the jars with paper or parchment tied over the top, which is an air cover, not a seal.
- VocabularyA preserving pan is a wide, shallow, unlidded pan for fast evaporation. A fish kettle is a long lidded pan with a lifting rack. "Russian cranberries" arriving in water were shipped submerged; whether they were true cranberries or lingonberries the entry does not say. A febrifuge is a fever-reducer — a medical aside, not a claim to test.
- The fragment at the topThe opening line is the tail of the preceding recipe in the book, not a complete one: a quarter pound of fruit, a teaspoonful of honey, served in a trifle dish under plain cream. There is no way to reconstruct what fruit was meant.
Lady Clark of Tillypronie's book was compiled from her own manuscript notes on the family estate in Aberdeenshire and published posthumously in 1909, edited by Catherine Frere, which is why so many entries read as jottings with a house or a contributor's name attached — Caldy Manor 1886, Trebah 1880, Mrs Young — rather than as finished recipes. The cranberry entries are worth reading closely: in Scotland the berry gathered from the moor was usually the cowberry or lingonberry, while the Russian import arrived in barrels of water. Lingonberries are traditionally said to keep almost indefinitely under plain water, a practice generally attributed to their unusually high benzoic acid content, and Mrs Young's bottles of moor water and fresh berries are a domestic version of that Northern European habit. The bladder as a jar cover, meanwhile, was the standard sealing material in country houses before screw-band and rubber-ringed jars became cheap and universal.