Over the past few months, archaeologists at George Washington’s Mount Vernon have uncovered some 35 bottles of preserved berries from the mansion’s cellar. The bottles have been buried for approximately 250 years, and several unopened bottles have yielded perfectly preserved fruit, liquid, and other organic residues. The bottles are undergoing cleaning and preservation, and the contents are being scientifically analyzed by the US Department of Agriculture to determine precise fruit varietal information and preservation techniques. Fruit pits and stones are also being examined to see if any of the seeds are candidates for germination. Imagine cherry trees in the estate’s kitchen garden made up pf descendants of 18th-Century trees!
I am most interested in learning what mass spectrometry and other analytical methods can tell us about the methods of preservation.
Were these fruits packed in sugary syrup, or pickled in vinegar, or preserved in some other way? A quick perusal of my 1770 copy of Hannah Glasse’s Art of Cookery show most preserves were made with sugary syrup, . Glasse’s recipes for dried fruits also call for sugary syrup and boiling the fruits before drying, but there are also recipes using vinegar before the syrup when preserving cherries with stem and green leaves intact. Interestingly, Glasse calls for cherries to be pitted or stoned before or after boiling for preserving and drying. The whole fruits found in the Mount Vernon excavations all had their pits and stones intact.
Delving a bit deeper, Martha Washington’s recipe for preserved cherries makes no mention of stoning the fruits.
It also calls for stems to be snipped midway through – just as the cherries were found in the recent Mount Vernon digs, The following recipe is from Martha’s manuscript cookbook with the unwieldly title: Martha Washington’s Booke of Cookery and Booke of Sweetmeats: Being a Family Manuscript, curiously copied by an unknown Hand sometime in the 17th Century, which was in her keeping from 1749, the time of her Marriage to Daniel Custis, to 1799, at which time she gave it to Eleanor Parke Custis, her granddaughter, on the occasion of her Marriage to Lawrence Lewis:
Martha Washington’s Seventeenth-Century Recipe
“To Preserve Cherries”
Take 2 pound of faire cherries & clip of the stalks in ye midst. then wash them clean, but bruise them not. then take 2 pound of double refined sugar, & set it over ye fire with a quart of faire water in ye broadest preserving pan or silver basen as you can get. let it seeth till it be some what thick, yn put in yr cherries, &; let them boyle. keepe allwayes scumming & turning them gently with a silver spoon till they be enough. When they are cold, you may glass them up & keep them all the year.
So based only on the appearance of the Mount Vernon finds, the preserved cherries were prepared according to Martha Washington’s family recipe. So, what about gooseberries and currants? How might they have been preserved?
Glasse calls for preserving gooseberries – with stones intact – in a sugary syrup after scalding them to soften their texture. Interestingly, some of the berries are sugared directly, while other berries make a secondary syrup that is poured over the first batch after they cool and dry a bit. She also has additional recipes for storing green and red gooseberries. The green gooseberries are left unsugared, to keep their wonderful tart flavor unsullied, while the red gooseberries are mixed with fine Lisbon sugar.
Currants in Glasse’s book can be preserved in a sugary syrup, much as described above, or interestingly pickled in white-wine vinegar with sugar, salt and a little fennel.
I wonder how these preserved and pickled fruits were used in the kitchen, don’t you? With at least a couple of the possible preservation recipes being unsugared or made with modest amounts of sugar, there may have been some appreciation of the tart fruits, perhaps as an accompaniment to fish and meat dishes as we see in Western Asian cuisines. We all know about the early European and American interest in curries, chutneys, and Indian pickles, so finding a dish adapted from the Persian tradition is not necessarily out of the question. I’ll be doing some research on this and will discuss in the next post. Stay Tuned.
Words by Laura M. Kelley. Photos courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association
Special thanks to Stephen Kelley for his research assistance.