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Preserved Fruits (See also Sweet Dishes)
(See also Sweet Dishes.) For "Mishmash," the Eastern name for apricots preserved whole, use the finest French apricots from Covent Garden; open them at the side with a pen-knife, and thrust out the stone; peel them, and, as each is peeled, throw powdered sugar over it. Have more powdered sugar in a pan, and boil it to candy height; then add the apricots and give them a boil, but take the greatest care that they do not break. Take off the pan, and take the apricots out. Let the syrup stand till it is almost cold. Then add the fruit; cover it with white paper, and put it on a slow fire to simmer a little longer; repeat this three or four times, letting the syrup be almost cold each time, before putting it again on the fire.
The apricots should simmer gently till they become quite transparent; blanch their kernels, put them in at the last, boiling, and pot them with the fruit. If in the course of a few weeks the syrup should become thin, give it a boil up. Bilberries. (Mrs. Wellington.) Bilberries do not keep many weeks, but are very liked for tarts. Pick them carefully, and put them on the fire in a preserving pan without any water as they are very juicy. For each 1 lb. of fruit give ½ lb. of sugar. Let them boil ½ hour, then tie them up in jars. When you make the tart add a tablespoonful of Black Currant Jelly, not jam (see Jams, Jellies, &c.), to improve the flavour. Mrs. Davidson says they keep well if you allow 1 lb. of sugar to 1 lb. of fruit, and boil ½ hour - otherwise they turn sour.
Black Currants Preserved.
Take 1½ lbs. of sugar to 1 qt. of black currants, and to each qt. of black currants add ½ pt. of red currant juice without any additional sugar. Boil ½ hour. To preserve strawberries this way boil them 6 minutes only. Cherries Preserved the American Way. (Mrs. Hunting, New York.) Take Morella cherries. Stone them and set them aside on a plate. Weigh them. Take the same weight of sugar, put it in a preserving pan with a little water. When it boils, put in the cherries, and boil slowly till you can pierce them with a small twig. Then take them out, and leave them on a plate while you finish the syrup, slowly boiling it till it is clear; then while hot, drop in the cherries carefully, one by one. Then put them in pots.
Cranberries, German Way. (Princess von Reuss.) Pick some cranberries, and wash them if necessary. Strain off all the water. When, after a baking, bread is taken out of oven, fill oven with stone bottles full of cranberries. Leave them there all night; no water, no sugar. Paper over the bottles next day.
When wanted in winter for a dish, take out as much as you require, and to every
A run of preserving notes collected from several correspondents, in the compressed telegraphic style of a working manuscript book. Two of the methods here are not safe to reproduce, and the rest are written for a kitchen that judged sugar by eye and sealed jars with paper.
- The apricot kernelsThe instruction to blanch the kernels and pot them with the fruit is the reason this page carries a caution. Apricot kernels contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is chewed or digested; the amount an adult can tolerate is small, only a few kernels, and much smaller for a child. Kernels were used in nineteenth-century preserving for their bitter-almond flavour, and several national food agencies now advise against eating them at all.
- The cranberry bottlesPrincess von Reuss's method relies entirely on the residual heat of a cooling bread oven: raw fruit into stone bottles, left in overnight, then papered over next day. There is no measured temperature, no sugar, no acid addition and no airtight seal. Even with cranberries' natural acidity this is uncontrolled preserving, and the paper cover invites mould. Use a current tested recipe if you want to put up cranberries.
- Sealing generally"Tie them up in jars" and "put them in pots" mean a paper or bladder cover over a hot fill, with the sugar concentration doing the preserving. High-sugar jams made this way keep tolerably, but the book gives no boiling-water process, no headspace and no check on set, so none of these should be treated as instructions for shelf-stable canning.
- Candy heightFor the apricots, sugar boiled 'to candy height' is the highest of the old boiling degrees, at or just above what is now called hard crack; the book gives no temperature and the term was used loosely. The repeated cooling and reheating that follows is a genuine confectioner's technique for candied fruit: it lets sugar migrate into the flesh slowly, so the apricot turns translucent instead of collapsing.
- Mishmash and its fruit'The finest French apricots from Covent Garden' points to imported fruit bought at the London market; firm, barely ripe fruit is what the method needs, since soft or fully ripe apricots will break at the first boil, the failure the recipe keeps warning against.
- BilberriesBilberries are the small wild European blueberry, Vaccinium myrtillus, with dark flesh and much more juice than a cultivated blueberry. The two sugar ratios given, half a pound and a full pound per pound of fruit, reflect a real disagreement: the lower-sugar version does not keep, which is exactly what Mrs Davidson is warning about.
- Morella cherriesRead this as Morello, the dark sour cooking cherry. 'Boil slowly till you can pierce them with a small twig' is a doneness test, not a measurement; a fine skewer does the same job. Sweet dessert cherries are softer and more likely to break up before the syrup clears.
- Black currants with red currant juiceThe pint and a half of red currant juice added with no extra sugar is doing pectin and acid work, not sweetening. Red currants are among the highest-pectin fruits in the garden, which is why the six-minute strawberry variant on the same base can set at all.
- MeasuresPints and quarts here are imperial: a quart is 40 fl oz, about 1.14 litres, a fifth larger than a US quart. Measuring the fruit in American quarts against the stated pounds of sugar shifts the ratio, giving proportionally more sugar per unit of fruit.
Lady Clark of Tillypronie was Charlotte Coltman, wife of Sir John Forbes Clark of the Aberdeenshire estate of Tillypronie; the manuscript books she kept until her death in 1897 were edited by Catherine Frere and published in 1909. The character of the collection is visible in this single page: recipes arrive attributed to the women who supplied them, from Mrs Hunting in New York to Princess von Reuss, the fruit of a diplomatic household's long correspondence rather than any one kitchen's practice. "Mishmash" is given here as the Eastern name for whole preserved apricots; the technique of repeated slow candying in cooling syrup is the standard European confectioner's method for keeping whole fruit intact. The presence of Covent Garden apricots alongside bilberries marks the period exactly: a country house buying imported luxury fruit by rail while still putting up what grew on the hill.