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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Plain Canned Berries
Pick out stems or hulls if any-if gathered carefully the berries will not need washing, put in porcelain kettle on the stove, adding a small tea-cup water to prevent burning at first. When they come to a boil, skim well, add sugar to taste (for pies it may be omitted), let boil five minutes, fill in glass, stone, or tin cans, and seal with putty unless self-sealers are used. This rule applies to raspberrries, blackberries, currants, gooseberries, or any of the small berries.
This is open-kettle canning: fruit boiled in a pot, ladled hot into containers, and sealed with no processing afterward. It is the method every modern canning authority abandoned, and the specific failures here cannot be patched with a time or a temperature.
- No processing step at allThe berries are boiled, then poured into cans and sealed. Nothing sterilises the jar rim, the lid, the ladle or the headspace air after filling. Any yeast or mould introduced during transfer is sealed in with a warm, sweet, moist medium — ideal conditions for it. Berries are acidic enough that botulism is not the primary concern; spoilage organisms and mould are, and mould growth in canned fruit can raise the pH enough to change that calculation.
- Putty is not a food sealPeriod jar sealing compounds were variously made from rosin, tallow and beeswax, while glaziers' putty was whiting and linseed oil, sometimes with white lead or red lead added. Whatever the mix, it sat at the rim in contact with the jar's headspace, and there is no way to know what a given putty contained.
- Tin cans cannot be sealed at homeTin cans cannot be sealed at home with anything this book describes -- The book's "tin cans" were soldered shut, and nineteenth-century solder was generally lead-based. Acidic berry juice attacks tin and lead readily.
- "Self-sealers" meant something differentThe self-sealing jars of this period were Mason screw-top and Lightning glass-lidded types, both relying on rubber gaskets — rings that degraded with age and heat. A seal that held on the shelf overnight told the cook nothing about whether it would hold for six months.
- "Sugar to taste" and the pie exemptionThe recipe explicitly allows sugar to be left out for pie fruit. Sugar in canned fruit is a matter of flavour and texture, not preservation, so its omission is not the problem — but it does mean the safety of the jar rests entirely on the seal, and the seal is the weakest part of this method.
- Five minutes is for the fruit, not for safetyFive minutes is not a processing time -- A five-minute boil will kill spoilage organisms in the fruit itself, but nothing sterilises the container or the air sealed in with it. Reading the five minutes as a substitute for processing the filled jar is the error.
- What the terms meanA porcelain kettle is an enamelled or porcelain-lined pot, specified because iron and copper discolour berry juice and react with fruit acids. A "small tea-cup" of water is somewhere in the region of a half to three-quarters of a cup. Stone cans are glazed stoneware jars.
- If you want canned berriesUse a current tested recipe from a water-bath canning guide with measured headspace, jar preparation and processing time. Do not adapt this one.
Buckeye Cookery appeared in 1877, in the middle of the decades when home canning moved from a novelty to an expectation in American households. The Mason jar patent of 1858 had put reusable screw-top glass within reach, but it competed for years with soldered tin, glazed stoneware and rims luted shut with wax or putty — which is why this single short rule offers glass, stone and tin, with or without self-sealing closures, as equals. The technique it describes, boiling the fruit and trusting the seal, is what came to be called open-kettle canning; it was widespread in home practice until USDA and state extension bulletins in the early twentieth century began insisting on processing filled jars in boiling water. That the recipe covers raspberries, blackberries, currants and gooseberries under one heading reflects the kitchen garden of the period, where small soft fruit ripened faster than a family could eat it.