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Canned Plums
Wash and put whole into a syrup made in the proportion of a pint of water and a pound of sugar to every two pounds of fruit; boil for eight minutes, can, and seal immediately. If pricked with a fork before placing in syrup, they will be less liable to burst. Cherries are canned in the same way.
This is open-kettle canning: hot fruit ladled into jars and sealed with no processing afterward. It was standard practice in the 1870s and is no longer considered a safe way to put up fruit.
- No processing stepThe fruit is boiled eight minutes in the pot, then sealed and set aside. Nothing heats the filled, closed jar, so the headspace, the underside of the lid and the sealing surface are never brought to temperature. Current tested methods for plums call for a measured boiling-water bath after filling.
- The seal is the failure pointA lid that appears to pull down from cooling steam has not necessarily formed a reliable vacuum. Weak or partial seals let in air and let mould, yeasts and spoilage bacteria colonise a sugar syrup that is an excellent growth medium. Jar failures often show up weeks later, after the jars have been stored.
- Nineteenth-century closures were differentThis was written for the wax-sealed jars and zinc-cap-with-rubber-ring jars of the period. Modern two-piece lids are engineered around a heat-processing step and are not designed to be used the way this recipe assumes.
- Acidity helps, but does not substitutePlums and cherries are high-acid fruit, which makes Clostridium botulinum an unlikely hazard here. The realistic risk is spoilage organisms and mould growth in an unprocessed jar, which is why the recipe still should not be followed as printed.
- What to use insteadFollow a current tested canning recipe for plums in syrup, with a specified jar size, headspace and boiling-water processing time for your altitude.
- The syrup ratio, for referenceA pint of water to a pound of sugar per two pounds of fruit — roughly 2 cups water to about 2¼ cups sugar — is a heavy to very heavy syrup by modern reckoning. Present-day recipes more often use light or medium syrup, since the sugar is for flavour and texture rather than preservation.
- Pricking the fruitThe one piece of advice here that still holds. Piercing each plum lets steam escape as the fruit heats, so the skins split less and the fruit keeps its shape.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping came out of Ohio in the late 1870s, compiled from contributions by churchwomen, and its canning chapter arrived in the middle of the home-preserving boom that followed the spread of the screw-top glass jar. Fruit was an entry point for many households: it was cheap in season, abundant on farm trees, and open-kettle methods often worked well enough to seem safe. Plums and cherries were natural partners in a book like this — both ripen fast, and both bruise and rot quickly. The instruction to prick the skins is a reminder of how much of this cookery was practical observation passed between neighbours; the absence of any processing time is a reminder of how much was not yet understood about why some jars kept and others did not.