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.
In addition, this page gives advice for salvaging or disguising food that has begun to spoil. Spoiled food can carry dangerous bacteria and toxins that no washing, soaking, or seasoning removes; it should be discarded.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Warranted Canned Strawberries
Put four pounds white sugar in a kettle, add a teacup cold water, let boil till perfectly clear, then add four quarts nice berries. Boil ten minutes, keeping them covered with syrup, but avoid stirring in order to preserve their good appearance. Take out berries with a small strainer or skimmer, place in a crock and let the syrup boil ten minutes longer, then pour it over berries, and, when cool, fill the cans, putting a tablespoon of good brandy on top of each can, screw on lid tightly, and put in a dry dark place. This method is the only means of preserving the peculiar flavor of the strawberries. To prevent the second handling, put the hot berries in the cans (instead of the crock) till about three quarters full. When syrup has boiled, fill each can with it, let stand till cool, then cover with the tablespoon of brandy (take out a little juice if necessary) and screw on the lid.
If after two or three weeks the least fermentation appears, put the cans in a boiler (on a small board to prevent contact with bottom), fill with cold water nearly to top of cans, loosen the lids, but do not take them off, let water boil for a little while, then take out cans, tighten the covers and the berries will keep over a year. Fully ripe currants and acid cherries canned in same manner, one pound of sugar to one of dressed fruit, are delicious. They never need a second boiling if carefully prepared.
Always select perfect fruit; cook in porcelain, never in metal. In making catsup, instead of boiling, some sprinkle the tomatoes with salt and let them stand over night, then strain and add spices, etc., and a little sugar. Bottle in glass or stone, and never use tin cans; keep in a cool, dry, dark place. If, on opening, there is a leathery mold on top, carefully remove every particle of it, and the catsup will not be injured. To prevent this molding, some do not fill the bottles quite to the top with catsup, but fill up with hot vinegar. If there are white specks of mold all through the catsup it is spoiled. If, on opening and using a part, there is danger that the rest may sour, scald, and, if too thick, add vinegar. Sauces should always be made with great care in a pan set in hot water, having the sauce pan clean if a delicate flavor is desired, especially if the sauce is drawn butter. Butter and those sauces containing eggs should never boil. Wooden spoons must be used for stirring. An excellent thickening for soups, sauces and gravies is prepared as follows: Bring butter just to the boiling point in a small stewpan, dredge in flour, stirring together until well cooked. This, when not cooked brown, is "White Roux," and when browned, "Brown Roux." Thin this with a part of the soup, sauce or gravy, and add it to the whole, stirring thoroughly. The flour may be browned before using if intended for brown gravies or sauces. Melted butter may be used in place of oil in all recipes where the latter is named.
Mint, when used in recipes, usually means "spearmint" or "green mint," though pennyroyal and peppermint are of the same (128) family. The young leaves of from one to six inches in length are the parts used. It grows on any good garden soil, but comes forward earlier in a warm, sunny spot. It is propagated by cuttings or dividing the roots of old plants in the spring, is very prolific, and ought to find a place in every garden. Those who have conservatories should keep a root in pots, to use with spring lamb before the leaves would appear in the open air. Mint leaves for drying should be cut from the stalks just before the plant blossoms, and spread out thinly in some dry, shady place, where they can dry slowly. When dry, put up in paper bags and keep in a dry place until wanted.
This is open-kettle canning: hot fruit is ladled into jars, sealed, and set aside with no processing at all. The notes below explain the archaic language and then why the preserving method itself has been abandoned.
- Why it fails as writtenNothing in the procedure sterilises the jar interior, the lid, or the headspace air. In the main method the berries and syrup are combined in a crock and the cans filled when cool; the shortcut variant fills them hot. Either way, whatever mould spores and yeasts land on the rim and inside the jar are sealed in, which is exactly why the recipe has to tell you what to do when fermentation appears two or three weeks later. Use a current tested strawberry preserve or jam procedure with a measured boiling-water bath instead.
- The brandy does nothingA tablespoon of spirit floated on top of a quart of syrup is diluted to well under one percent alcohol once the contents mix — far below any preservative threshold. It was believed to seal the surface against air; it does not, and it cannot be counted on to protect the jar.
- Reboiling a fermenting jarThe instruction to set suspect cans in a boiler, loosen the lids and boil "for a little while" is salvage, not processing. Fermentation means the contents were already colonised, the sugar has been partly consumed, and an unmeasured reheat neither restores the fruit nor guarantees a seal. Fermenting jars go down the drain.
- The catsup advice is worseThe passage on scraping "leathery mold" off tomato catsup and pronouncing it uninjured is one of the clearest examples of pre-microbiological confidence in these books. Surface moulds send hyphae well below what you can see, can carry mycotoxins, and raise the pH of tomato as they grow, which is the specific condition that makes low-acid spoilage possible. Discard mouldy catsup entirely.
- "Cans" and lidsIn 1877 this means glass jars with zinc screw caps and rubber rings, tightened once and left. Modern two-piece lids are designed to vent during heat processing and then seal on cooling; screwing them down tight on unprocessed jars, as here, will not produce a reliable vacuum.
- Archaic measures and vesselsA teacup is smaller than a modern cup; nineteenth-century books reckon it variously, commonly at around three-quarters of a cup or less. A crock is a glazed earthenware jar used for holding, not cooking. "Cook in porcelain, never in metal" means enamelled or lined pans — bare iron, copper and tin discoloured acid fruit and tainted the flavour; stainless steel is fine now.
- "Dressed fruit"In the currant and cherry variation this means fruit already hulled, stemmed and pitted — the pound-for-pound sugar ratio is measured against the prepared weight, not the market weight.
- What is still soundThe technique itself — clarifying a syrup, poaching whole berries briefly, lifting them out and reducing the syrup separately, then reuniting them — is the correct way to keep whole strawberries from collapsing into jam, and the ban on stirring is the reason they hold their shape. That part is worth borrowing for a refrigerator preserve made in small quantity and eaten within a couple of weeks.
"Warranted" here means guaranteed — a small boast of the kind that spread through American cookbooks in the two decades after John Landis Mason's 1858 screw-top jar put sealed glass canning within reach of ordinary households. Buckeye Cookery, compiled in Ohio in the 1870s as a church-fundraiser collection from Ohio churchwomen and later expanded by an editor, belongs to the moment when home canning was new enough that competing methods circulated as personal warranties rather than tested procedure; the claim that this is "the only means of preserving the peculiar flavor of the strawberries" is a working cook's verdict on the flat, stewed taste of long-boiled fruit, and on that point the verdict holds. What the period lacked was any theory of what spoiled the jar, which is why the recipe's advice on fermentation and on catsup mould reads as folklore today. The long digression that follows — on roux, drawn butter, wooden spoons and the cultivation of spearmint — reflects a common feature of these books, in which miscellaneous household notes sit alongside unrelated material, so a page on strawberries ends with instructions for drying mint before it blossoms.