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.
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Canned Peaches Steamed
To peel, place in a wire basket, to the handle of which a cord has been tied, let down into boiling water for a moment, then into cold water, and strip off the skin (this saves both fruit and labor). The fruit must be at a certain stage to be prepared in this way, for if too green it will not peel, and if too ripe it will be too much softened by the hot water. After peeling, seed and place in a steamer over a kettle of boiling water, first laying a cloth in bottom of steamer; fill about half full of fruit, cover tightly, make a syrup in a porcelain kettle for fruit alone, let the fruit steam until it can be easily pierced with a silver fork, drop gently for a moment into the hot syrup, place in the cans, fill, cover, and seal. The above recipe is for canning a few at a time. This recipe, with the exception of mode of peeling, applies equally well to pears.
This is open-kettle canning: hot fruit is packed into jars and sealed with no processing afterward. The peeling and steaming technique is sound, but the preserving method has been obsolete for the better part of a century, and the recipe gives no quantities, no times and no temperatures anywhere.
- No processing step at allThe fruit goes from steamer to syrup to jar to lid, and that is the end of it. Nothing sterilises the jar contents after sealing, so any yeast, mould or bacterial spore introduced during packing survives. Current practice processes filled jars of peaches in a boiling-water canner for a measured time by jar size and altitude.
- The seal is unverifiedSealing a hot jar and trusting it to pull a vacuum as it cools was the norm with the zinc caps and rubber rings of the 1870s. Those closures failed silently and often, and this recipe offers no way to test the seal before the jars go on a shelf.
- No syrup specified"Make a syrup" gives no sugar-to-water ratio. Sugar concentration affects texture, colour retention and how the fruit floats in the jar, and in a recipe already lacking every other measurement its absence leaves nothing to work from.
- Pears are not peachesThe closing line extends the method to pears, which are somewhat less acidic than peaches. Both are still treated as acid foods, but some pears (Asian varieties in particular) are borderline enough that modern directions call for added acid, and all of them call for full processing.
- Fruit at "a certain stage"The recipe correctly notes that only peaches at the right ripeness will slip their skins after a dip in boiling water, but it never says which stage. Underripe fruit clings, overripe fruit collapses in the hot water.
- Porcelain kettleThis means an enamelled cast-iron or enamelled steel pan, not ceramic. It was specified because bare iron and copper discolour fruit and react with fruit acids; stainless steel serves the same purpose now.
- The silver forkSilver was commonly specified for testing fruit in recipes of the period, plausibly to avoid the discolouration an iron or steel fork could cause. It is a doneness cue, not a preserving instruction.
- If you want canned peachesUse a current tested recipe from a reputable canning authority, which will give jar size, headspace, syrup strength, processing time and altitude adjustment.
Buckeye Cookery came out of Ohio in the 1870s, in the years when the screw-top glass fruit jar and its rubber ring had put home canning within reach of ordinary households. The book's canning chapter reads like a set of workshop notes passed between women who had all done it before: the cord tied to the wire basket, the cloth in the bottom of the steamer, the aside that blanching "saves both fruit and labor" by lifting the skin instead of cutting it away. What is missing is exactly what the period had not yet worked out. The bacteriology of spoilage was only beginning to be understood in the 1870s, and measured boiling-water processing of sealed jars did not become standard household advice until well into the following decades. Recipes like this one were the accumulated common sense of cooks who could see mould but not spores, and they represent a genuine step in preserving practice rather than a method to repeat.