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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KEEPING PEASE FOR WINTER USE
Shell, throw into boiling water with a little salt, boil five or six minutes, drain in a colander and afterwards on a cloth, until completely dried, and place in air-tight bottles. Some use widemouthed bottles, not quite filling them, pouring over fried mutton fat so as to cover the pease, and cork tightly, securing the cork with resin or sealing wax. When used, boil until tender, and season with butter.
This is a nineteenth-century method for holding shelled peas through the winter, and it belongs to the history of food preservation rather than to any modern kitchen. The points below explain what goes wrong.
- Low-acid vegetable, no pressureGreen peas sit around pH 6.2, well above the acidity that suppresses Clostridium botulinum. A five- or six-minute boil in salted water kills nothing that matters here; spores survive hours of boiling and require pressure canning at 240F to be destroyed.
- The fat seal is the specific hazardPouring melted mutton fat over the peas and corking creates exactly the oxygen-free, room-temperature, low-acid environment in which botulinum spores germinate and produce toxin. The same principle makes traditional fat-sealed potted meats dangerous. The toxin is odourless and tasteless.
- Drying on a cloth is not sterileThe peas are handled, spread on linen, and air-dried between the boil and the bottling — reintroducing surface organisms and moisture at precisely the wrong moment. This is not drying in any preservation sense; the peas remain a moist, high-water-activity food.
- "Air-tight bottles" of the periodCorks sealed with resin or sealing wax gave a seal that was neither reliably airtight nor inspectable. There is no vacuum to check and no lid to fail visibly, so spoilage gives no warning before the jar is opened.
- Sealing wax and resinNineteenth-century sealing compounds and resins were not formulated as food contact materials.
- What to do insteadPeas freeze extremely well after a brief blanch, and are one of the vegetables that loses least in the freezer. If you want them shelf-stable, use a current pressure-canning guide with tested times, or buy them dried.
Buckeye Cookery was assembled in Minneapolis in 1877 by the women of a Marysville, Ohio church circle, in a decade when the household still had to solve the whole calendar for itself: peas came in for a few weeks in June and then nothing until the following summer. Sealing food under a cap of rendered fat is one of the oldest preservation tricks in Europe, familiar from potted meats and confits, and it worked well enough with salted, fatty, cooked meat to encourage cooks to extend it to vegetables, where it does not work at all. Within a generation the problem was solved commercially instead: canned peas were among the earliest and most successful factory-canned vegetables in America, and home methods like this one quietly disappeared.