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String-Beans
String fresh string-beans, break in several pieces, cook in boiling water ten minutes, and can like tomatoes. - Mrs. L. W. C., Cincinnati.
This is a low-acid vegetable sealed in a jar and processed as if it were fruit, which is the one combination home canning cannot survive. The method was standard in 1877 and is now understood to be a direct route to botulism.
- Why it failsGreen beans have a pH around 5.5, well above the 4.6 threshold below which Clostridium botulinum cannot grow. "Can like tomatoes" means a boiling-water process at 212F, which kills spoilage yeasts and molds but leaves botulinum spores intact in a sealed, oxygen-free jar — ideal conditions for them to germinate and produce toxin.
- Ten minutes is a blanch, not a processBoiling the cut beans for ten minutes softens them for packing. It contributes nothing to the safety of the sealed jar, and the recipe itself specifies no jar size, headspace, salt quantity or processing time; all of that is left to the cross-reference to the book's tomato directions.
- The toxin gives no warningBotulinum toxin is odorless and tasteless, and affected jars often look and smell normal. There is no reliable household test — the period advice to reject anything that smells off does not apply here.
- Tomatoes were the wrong modelFruit and tomato canning worked, and period directions commonly extended the same treatment to vegetables, apparently on the assumption that the seal was the active principle. The distinction between acid and low-acid foods, and the need for temperatures above boiling, did not enter home practice until pressure canners came into general use in the early twentieth century.
- If you want canned beansUse a current tested procedure from a food-safety authority, which will specify pressure canning with measured pressures and times. Do not adapt the instructions above.
- What is safe from this pageNothing about the canning. Stringing fresh beans, breaking them into pieces and boiling them ten minutes is a fine way to cook beans for the table, and at that length they will be fully tender rather than crisp.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping appeared in 1877, compiled from Ohio contributors, at a time when home canning was spreading fast: Mason's screw-top jar had been patented in 1858, glass jars and zinc lids were cheap and widely sold by the 1870s, and community cookbooks filled their preserving chapters with contributions credited to local women — here only by initials, Mrs. L. W. C. of Cincinnati. Directing that a vegetable be canned "like tomatoes" is the whole problem in miniature: vegetables were folded into fruit practice, on the assumption that an airtight seal was the active principle. The beans themselves are the old-fashioned kind: "string" beans took the name from the fibrous seam along the pod that had to be pulled off before cooking, a trait largely bred out of commercial green beans over the twentieth century, which is why the stringing step in period recipes now reads as puzzling.