Important: Safety Warning
This page describes home-canning methods from before the causes of botulism were understood. Canning low-acid foods without a pressure canner, as described here, can allow the growth of Clostridium botulinum, whose toxin is among the deadliest known. Follow current USDA home-canning guidelines instead.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Home › Canning Fruits › Canned Peaches (Have one porcelain kettle)
Canned Peaches (Have one porcelain kettle)
Have one porcelain kettle with boiling water and another with a syrup made sweet enough with white sugar for the peaches; pare, halve, and drop them into the boiling water, let them remain until a silver fork will pierce them, lift them out with a wire spoon, fill can, pour in all the boiling syrup the can will hold, and seal immediately. Continue in this way, preparing and sealing only one can at a time, until done; boil down the water in first kettle with the syrup, if any is left; if not, add more sugar, and quite a nice marmalade will result. This manner of canning peaches has been thoroughly tested, and is pronounced by the experienced the best of all methods. Mrs. R. A. Sharp, Kingston.
This is open-kettle canning: hot fruit and syrup packed into jars and sealed with no processing afterwards. It was standard practice in the 1870s and is no longer considered safe, so the notes below explain the failure points rather than offering a conversion.
- No processing stepNothing here heats the sealed jar. The seal is formed by the contraction of hot contents cooling, which is unreliable, and any organism introduced between the kettle and the lid — from the fork, the wire spoon, the jar rim, the air — is sealed in with warm sweet fruit. Modern practice requires a measured boiling-water bath after the jars are filled and closed.
- Why peaches are not exemptPeaches are generally treated as a high-acid fruit and so are not a classic botulism vehicle, which is why this method appeared to work for generations. The likelier hazards are yeast and mould spoilage; moulds growing on the surface of acid fruit can raise the pH locally, which is why fermented, cloudy or mould-flecked jars are treated as unsafe to eat rather than merely unappetising.
- Nothing is measuredThe syrup is "sweet enough," the blanching runs until "a silver fork will pierce them," and there is no headspace, no acidification, no processing time. There is no way to reproduce a tested result from these instructions, which is precisely the standard current canning guidance is built on.
- The jars themselvesThe 'cans' of 1877 would most often have been glass jars with zinc caps and rubber rings, tightened by hand after filling, though tin cans were also still in use. Two-piece lids with a sealing compound behave differently and are designed to vent during processing and seal as the jar cools in the canner — using them for open-kettle work does not make the method sound.
- Porcelain kettleNot porcelain in the ceramic sense but an enamelled iron or steel pan, specified because bare iron and copper discolour pale fruit and react with acid. A stainless or enamelled pan is the equivalent.
- The marmalade at the endBoiling down the blanching water with the leftover syrup gives a thin peach syrup or soft preserve. Eaten fresh and refrigerated it is unobjectionable; it should not be jarred and stored by this method either.
- If you want canned peachesUse a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority, with a stated syrup strength, headspace and boiling-water processing time for your jar size and altitude.
Buckeye Cookery (1877) collected contributions from Ohio housewives, and the attribution to Mrs. R. A. Sharp of Kingston is typical of the book's method: authority came from a named neighbour who had done it many times, not from a laboratory. Home canning in glass had only been practical since the middle of the century, and the period's cookbooks are full of competing systems — cold pack, hot pack, open kettle, sealing with wax or bladder — each defended as "thoroughly tested" and "pronounced by the experienced the best of all methods." The claim was sincere; what nobody in 1877 had was a way to distinguish a jar that was sterile from one that merely had not spoiled yet. Systematic study of home canning safety came decades later, largely through the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the state agricultural experiment stations, and it is that work — not any change in the fruit — that made open-kettle canning obsolete. The thrifty coda, boiling the blanching water down into marmalade so that no sugar is wasted, is the more durable lesson of the page.