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Canned Strawberries (For every quart of fresh)
For every quart of fresh strawberries, take one coffee-cup of white sugar; add a table-spoon or two of water to the fruit if there is no juice in the bottom, to prevent burning before the heat brings out the juice. As soon as the fruit boils, add the sugar, and stir gently for a few minutes until it boils up again, and can immediately. It is better not to cook any more fruit than can be put into one glass fruit-jar. Usually a few spoonfuls of the syrup will be left with which to begin the next can. Strawberries are considered difficult to keep, but there need be no trouble if the fruit is fresh and the can is closed air-tight in glass, and kept as directed in general directions for canning fruits. -Mrs. H. S. Huntington, Galesburg, Ill.
This is open-kettle canning: hot fruit ladled into a jar, the lid closed, and nothing more. That method was standard in 1877 and is no longer considered sound, so the notes below explain the units and the failure points rather than offering a working procedure.
- Why it failsNothing in the recipe brings the sealed jar to a known temperature for a known time. The seal is formed by trapped steam alone, which gives an unreliable vacuum, and the outside of the jar rim, the lid and the air drawn in as the jar cools are never sterilised. Mould and yeast spoilage in high-sugar fruit is the usual result, and a jar that appears sealed may not be.
- The missing stepModern practice for berries is a measured boiling-water bath after filling, with headspace, jar temperature and processing time specified for the jar size. None of that is here; the recipe refers the reader to the book's "general directions for canning fruits," which are not on this page. Use a current tested recipe from a reliable canning source instead.
- Coffee-cupA coffee-cup is usually reckoned as roughly a standard 8 oz cup, though period coffee-cups ran anywhere from 6 oz to a scant 9. It is one of the measurements you cannot pin down precisely, which matters here because sugar concentration is part of what preserves the fruit.
- A quart of strawberriesA dry quart of berries is about 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb, or roughly 3 to 3 1/2 cups hulled. A coffee-cup of sugar is around half a pound, so the sugar runs to roughly a third of the weight of the fruit — a lightly sweetened pack rather than a preserve-strength one.
- One jar at a timeThe instruction to cook only as much fruit as fills a single jar is sound reasoning for its own time: berries collapse and lose colour with long boiling, and a small batch spends less time in the pan. It also tells you the author expected the jar to be filled and closed while the fruit was still at a rolling boil.
- The leftover syrupCarrying a few spoonfuls of syrup forward to start the next batch replaces the tablespoon of water and prevents scorching before the next lot of berries release their juice. It is a practical touch, not a preservation step.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping grew out of Ohio church and community contributions, and its canning chapter reflects the moment when home preserving in glass had just become plausible for ordinary households: John Landis Mason's screw-top jar patent dates to 1858, and by the 1870s glass jars with rubber rings and metal caps were widely sold. Strawberries had a reputation as the hardest fruit to keep, partly because they are soft and juicy and partly, one suspects, because open-kettle sealing was thought to be especially unreliable with them, which is exactly the anxiety Mrs. Huntington is answering when she insists there "need be no trouble." The sugar was doing much of the preserving work; nineteenth-century cooks understood sugar as a keeper long before anyone could name the microbiology, and the recipe sits at the boundary between jam-making and canning proper.