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Canned Corn
Dissolve an ounce tartaric acid in half tea-cup water, and take one table-spoon to two quarts of sweet corn; cook, and while boiling hot, fill the cans, which should be tin. When used turn into a colander, rinse with cold water, add a little soda and sugar while cooking, and season with butter, pepper and salt. -Miss Lida Cartmell.
This is a nineteenth-century method for putting up sweet corn with acid instead of pressure, and it belongs to the history of food preservation rather than to any present-day kitchen. The notes below explain what the method assumed and where it fails.
- Corn is a low-acid foodSweet corn sits around pH 6.5, well above the pH 4.6 threshold below which Clostridium botulinum cannot grow. A tablespoon of tartaric acid solution spread through two quarts of corn does not come close to acidifying the mass, and the recipe gives no way to verify that it has.
- Boiling temperature is not enoughFilling cans with boiling-hot corn reaches about 212F. Botulinum spores in a sealed, oxygen-free, low-acid container can survive hours of boiling and need roughly 240F held for a measured time, which only a pressure canner produces. The toxin they later generate is odorless and tasteless, and the recipe gives no reheating time that could be relied on to destroy it.
- No processing time at allThe instruction is simply to fill and seal. There is no stated hold at temperature, no headspace, no seal test, and no guidance on jar or can size, so nothing in the procedure can be scaled or checked. Modern canning directions for corn are precise about all of these because the margin is small.
- The rinse and soda step is a warning signTurning the corn into a colander, rinsing it, and adding soda to neutralize the acid tells you how much tartaric acid the cook expected to taste. Soda also raises pH further, and rinsing washes away the only preservative in the jar before the corn is warmed through.
- Tin cansHome canners of the 1870s and 1880s commonly sealed tin cans with solder and rosin, which is likely why the recipe calls for tin. Solder of the period contained lead, and acidified contents in a tinned can can leach metal. Sealing equipment of this solder-and-rosin kind is no longer made or sold for food use.
- If you want canned cornUse a current tested procedure from a food-preservation authority, with a pressure canner and stated times for your jar size and altitude. Freezing blanched kernels is the simpler route and needs no special equipment.
Buckeye Cookery appeared in 1877, in the decades when home canning moved from a novelty to a routine household task, and its canning chapter reflects a period when cooks were improvising from whatever they had read or been told. Sweet corn was a notorious failure case: it spoiled more often than fruit, and nineteenth-century cookbooks offered acid, salicylic acid, salt, or repeated boilings as remedies, none of which addressed the actual problem. Fruit succeeded because its own acidity did the preserving work, and cooks reasonably inferred that adding acid to corn would do the same. Tartaric acid, a byproduct of winemaking, was a cheap grocery-store powder then used in baking powders and effervescent drinks. The mechanism that made all these vegetable methods unsafe was not properly understood until the botulism outbreaks of the early twentieth century, which prompted systematic canning research by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the National Canners Association and university laboratories -- work that produced the processing schedules still in use. Recipes like this one, signed by a contributor and passed among neighbors, show how preservation knowledge circulated by testimony rather than by measurement.