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 Tomatoes
Canned Tomatoes
The tomatoes must be entirely fresh and not overripe; pour over them boiling water, let stand a few minutes, drain off, remove the skins, and slice crosswise into a stone jar, cutting out all the hard or defective portions; cook for a few minutes in their own juice, skimming off the scum which rises, and stirring with a wooden spoon or paddle; have the cans on the hearth filled with hot water; empty, and fill with hot tomatoes; wipe moisture from tops with soft cloth, put on and secure covers. If tin cans are used, press down covers, and pour hot sealing wax into grooves. If put up in glass, set away in a dark place. Either tin, glass or stone cans may be used, and all may be sealed with putty instead of wax, it being more convenient. (See general instructions for canning fruit.)
This is open-kettle canning: the jars are never processed after filling, and nothing is measured. Tomatoes are the one fruit where that gap matters most, and the sealing methods described here have no modern equivalent.
- No heat process after sealingThe tomatoes are simmered "a few minutes" in an open stone jar, then ladled hot into hot containers and closed. Nothing is held at a measured temperature for a measured time, so there is no step that addresses Clostridium botulinum spores, which survive boiling and germinate in a sealed, oxygen-free jar.
- Tomatoes are not reliably acidicCanning guidance once treated tomatoes as a high-acid fruit, and this recipe points the reader to the general instructions for canning fruit. Some varieties, and any overripe or bruised fruit, test above pH 4.6, the line below which botulinum cannot grow. Current practice requires added bottled lemon juice or citric acid in every jar for exactly this reason.
- Sealing wax and puttyPouring hot wax into the grooves of a tin can, or bedding a lid in putty, produces a seal that cannot be inspected and gives no vacuum signal. Putty of the period could contain white lead. Neither material belongs anywhere near food.
- Tin cansThe plain tin cans assumed here were hand-soldered, usually with lead solder, and were intended to be sealed by the household. They have no modern counterpart in a domestic kitchen.
- The stone jarA "stone jar" is glazed stoneware, used here as the cooking vessel, though the recipe also allows stone cans for storage. Some nineteenth-century glazes contained lead and none were tested for release, and hot acidic tomato pulp is the kind of thing that can draw lead out of a glaze.
- What the good advice in it tells youThe scalding and skinning, the wooden paddle to avoid metal taint, the cans preheated with hot water so glass does not crack, and the wiping of the rim before sealing are all still correct technique. The failure is entirely in the processing and the closures, not the handling.
- If you want canned tomatoesUse a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority, with the specified acidification and a measured boiling-water or pressure process. Do not adapt the instructions above.
Buckeye Cookery appeared in 1877, in the middle of the decades when home canning moved from a novelty to a routine autumn chore in American households. The Mason jar with its threaded zinc cap had been patented in 1858, but tin cans sealed at the kitchen table with wax or solder remained common and cheap, and this recipe treats all three vessels — tin, glass, stoneware — as interchangeable. The instruction to set glass jars "away in a dark place" reflects a real observation, that light bleaches and dulls preserved produce, and it is still sound advice. What the period lacked was any understanding of anaerobic spore-forming bacteria: botulinum was not identified until 1895, and reliable processing times for home canning were not published in the United States until the twentieth century, which is why the confident brevity of "cook for a few minutes" reads so differently now.