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Preserved Plums
Jennie June.
Allow to every pound of fruit three-quarters of a pound of sugar; put into stone jars alternate layers of fruit and sugar, and place the jars in a moderately warm oven. Let them remain there until the oven is cool, If prepared at tea time let them remain until morning; then strain the juice from the plums, boil and clarify it, Remove the fruit carefully to glass or china jars, pour over the hot syrup and carefully cover with egg, tissue paper, or thick white paper pasted, or bladder tied closely down.
This is a nineteenth-century oven-preserve, in which fruit is never brought to a boil and the finished jars are closed with paper or bladder rather than sealed. The chemistry it relies on is sound in outline and unverifiable in practice, and the points below explain where it breaks down.
- Why it fails: no temperature anywhere"Moderately warm" and "until the oven is cool" describe a cooling brick oven, not a controlled process. Nothing in the method guarantees the fruit or the jars ever reach a temperature that destroys spoilage yeasts and moulds, and there is no way to reconstruct one from the text.
- Why it fails: the closure is not a sealPasted paper, tissue, egg white as a glue, or a tied-down bladder are vapour barriers, not hermetic seals. They admit air and airborne mould spores as the syrup contracts, which is precisely how these preserves were known to go furry on top. A modern tested water-bath canning recipe should be used instead.
- Why it fails: strained syrup, unheated fruitWhy it fails: strained syrup, fruit never reliably heated -- Only the juice is boiled and clarified. The plums have sat in a cooling oven at an unknown temperature, and are then simply lifted into fresh jars and covered with hot syrup, which will not heat a dense mass of fruit through. Any contamination on the fruit or in the second set of jars stays where it is.
- Mould is not just cosmeticScraping mould off a preserve and using the rest was a common nineteenth-century practice. Some moulds that grow on fruit produce mycotoxins, such as patulin from Penicillium expansum, which can diffuse into the fruit below the visible growth.
- Stone jarsGlazed stoneware crocks, which stood oven heat better than glass and warmed slowly. The recipe reserves glass or china for the second stage, after the fruit comes out of the oven.
- "Cover with egg"Egg white, brushed onto paper, was used as a paste and varnish that dried to a stiff skin over the jar mouth. It is a glue, not a preservative.
- The proportions, for the recordThree-quarters of a pound of sugar to a pound of fruit is roughly 1 3/4 cups granulated sugar per pound, slightly below the pound-for-pound ratio common in period preserves. Sugar at that level does suppress microbial growth, but it does not compensate for an unsealed jar or an unheated fruit interior.
"Jennie June" was the pen name of Jane Cunningham Croly (1829-1901), an English-born American journalist who wrote enormously popular household and fashion columns and is generally credited as the first woman to syndicate a newspaper column in the United States. Compilations like The Home Cook Book — assembled in Toronto in the 1870s from contributions by local women and lifted freely from the press — routinely reprinted her recipes under that byline, which is why a signed name sits at the head of an otherwise anonymous preserve. The method itself belongs to the era of the cooling wood-fired oven: after the bread came out, the falling residual heat was too good to waste, and fruit set in the oven overnight to draw its own juice was a way of turning a dying fire into a winter's worth of plums. The list of closures — pasted paper, egg white, bladder — suggests a household that had not taken up the screw-top glass canning jar, available from 1858 but by no means universal, and shows how much of preserving was still a matter of hoping to keep the air out.