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Preserving fruit for the entire year

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Take a rounded glass phial, with a large enough opening to receive cherries and plums and whatever fruit you want. Put in some hot water and leave it for two hours, and once your water is cold, throw it out and turn the phial upside down onto its opening on a perfectly even table and in a room where there is not a bit of draft or wind. Then prepare a stopper of fresh wax, wrapped in oilcloth, and adapt it precisely to the glass phial so that it will be ready to stop it once you have put in the fruit. And once you have hand—picked the fruit, only the non—rotten fruit, and on a warm and dry day, withdraw to the room, well closed so that no wind or draft can get in, and put it gently and deftly in the bottle. Then stop the bottle well with the stopper and lute it, making your lute, if you want, with some quicklime and oil, so that no water gets in. Then put your bottles into a tub full of water, in a cellar, during the summer, and in the winter put your bottles into a basket filled with some weights and lower it to the bottom of a deep well. Because in the winter the water in the tub would be too cold if your cellar is not warm enough, because the water needs to be like river water.

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Polished cardboard of little thickness and slightly humid is appropriate. Then if you want, strengthen it with some paper glued on the reverse side.

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Steel is applied to tools not on both sides, but underneath the part where one sharpens and whets them, and this part must be made of very soft iron.

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Levantines refine our own steel because their country provides them with none, and they reheat it in a pot with bitumen etc.