Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/06/19/perfectly-preserved-18th-century-cherries-found-in-george-washingtons-mount-vernon-basement.html
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[ article posted by Allan Rose Hill ]
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The seeds might be viable, but depending on the canning method, I doubt it.
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This serves as my reminder that an archaeologist’s definition of “perfectly preserved” is not the same as other people’s (e.g. a cook’s) definition.
Yeah, I was just thinking that any canning method that allows you to get perfectly preserved fruit 250 years later is going to directly work against getting much in the way of useful DNA or viable seeds.
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Hah, as an archaeologist I didn’t even spot that. I was just excited about how well preserved they were (and that they were excavated in context).
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As someone interested in archaeology, food and their overlaps, reading that headline put me through… a process.
Inner foodie: “Oh, oh, perfectly preserved foodstuffs… can we eat them, then?”
Inner archaeologist:
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Don’t be so sure about that.
DNA is extremely stable, compared to other stuff.
And plants are fucking amazing in regard to diaspore viability.
The point of preservation of food is to stop detrimental external influences. The additional point for maintaining diaspore viability is to delay any internal biological processes. Those are more compatible than one would think.
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I don’t discount that there might be usable DNA/viable seeds, but successful 18th century bottling would consist of two things - cooking (not great for the viability of most seeds, especially since cherry seeds might be viable for a couple decades at best, and berry seeds for a lot less, under ideal conditions) and, since this pre-dates modern canning, acid (really not great for DNA preservation).
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I feel like that’s how people respond to most things anyway.
Marine biologist: We discovered a new species of semi-gelatinous worm that lives in whale carcasses and uses copious mucus to strangle and ingest scavengers!
Internet comments: Wow, how does it taste?
Marine biologist: How does the incredibly rare, almost inaccessible, living nightmare snot string found inside rancid whale taste?
Internet comments: Yeah!
Marine biologist: I wouldn’t know. Mandy kept all the samples.
What? DNA doesn’t survive that long in room temperature water. 
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You keep using that term, “Perfectly preserved.” I do not think it means what you think it means.
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Some cherries are early successional species with a high dispersal ability through zoochory, with adaptation for gut passage, including a strong protective testa. They do contribute to a rather persistent seed bank. I would not bet that a jar of preserves provides Goldilocks zone conditions, but I also would not bet against it.
Need more data. Cannot compute.
ETA:
True.
Also true:
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The cooking bit is what seems most problematic for seed viability, though. (At least for most plants that aren’t fire-dispersed.)
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I don’t know how this specimen was preserved, but getting it rather sterile without killing the kernel’s content is still in the realm of possibilities.
¯\(ツ)/¯
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Yeah, but that’s referring to very best case situations like permafrost, not situations like brining or pickling or whatever was done to kill decomposers here. And if you check it’s not really for usable DNA – like the reference it gives says that it’s only things with multiple copies like mtDNA are likely to be recovered at all. Given that we can get similar fragments of protein sequences and intact cell structures from some things millions of years old, that doesn’t make it sound more stable than most other stuff to me.
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What this proves is that the people who run Mt. Vernon don’t clean very often.
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Rumtopf is a traditional way of preserving fruit by immersing it in rum or brandy.
I don’t know how long it can be expected to last — the longest claim I can find via google is “years” — but maybe it’s possible under ideal conditions for the fruit to be “perfectly preserved” in the archaeological sense.
Attention experts: would long exposure to alcohol preserve or damage DNA?
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Washington’s Cherry Bounce recipe used quite a bit of cherries. From his own recipe as written & spelled:
”Extract the juice of 20 pounds well ripend morrella cherrys
Add to this 10 quarts of old french brandy and sweeten it with white sugar to your taste
—To 5 Gallons of this mixture add one ounce of spice such as cinnamon, cloves and Nutmegs of each an Equal quantity slightly bruisd and a pint and half of cherry kirnels that have been gently broken in a mortar
—After the liquor has fermented let it stand close-stoped for a month or six weeks then bottle it remembering to put a lump of Loaf Sugar into each bottle.”
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yes
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So do you follow that guy on Youtube who eats old MREs and other old preserved foodstuffs?
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