Well, I preserved 12 quart-sized jars of apples, peaches, pears, and plums in alcohol in early September, expecting them to be ready for late December (as was suggested on one website). I opened a few today, and the first one bubbled and overflowed when I removed the lid! Now what? I opened another and it did not do this, but the fruit on top was brown compared with the normal looking fruit on the bottom. I feel that my economic practice was not so economical.
Was the bubbling a normal thing? As I search for answers, there is nothing on the internet. Is no one else having this problem? I want to cook with these fruits and the rum or vodka in which they are preserved. The Etsy.com website group has an "Eatsy" blog because they believe in home economic practices, but they didn't help me with the assumed bubble problem.
Astray dot com has some info on alcohol-preserved fruit, but nothing about what it should actually look like when ready. Or if the bubbling is normal - do mine mean that fermentation has occurred? And what exactly does that mean? As for now, I feel that I have done a poor economic job in preserving fruit this way, and I'll be stuck with 12 Mason Ball pint jars (not that I won't find other uses) and in the meantime, maybe this kind of preservation will become more popular and more information will appear on the internet.
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Are you poring through old cookbook texts at the library or bought online? I believe you need the old texts. I wonder if Google won't have scanned a lot of these perhaps - it's so cool to see the old pages scanned in - when the originals aren't available, I mean. These will be very inspiring starting-off places.
ReplyDeleteBut for safety's sake, you will still need to have real life fairly current (1960's at least) accounts which I'll wager you will find in back (or current maybe) issues of Mother Earth News, - or the Backwoodsman, or similar mags, and then online, with survival/return to simplicity/home preservation people. It will be in sub-nets, not in the top layer. I would also post an an announcement/query in The Budget, off-line newspaper only - that world will surely know!
Have you asked Martha Stewart? (I'm serious.)
Also, I think we need to figure out historically what group of people from what area, when, would be the ones using this practice - that would help find who to ask!
good luck
p.s. I know you received a lot of feedback on fb for this and actually I haven't kept up with that dialogue there - so perhaps you've already received a conclusion there!