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Apples
It does not pay to can apples that may be eaten fresh during the winter, but fall apples of fine flavor that can not be kept any length of time are most excellent canned for use either in pies or sauce in the late spring and early summer.
Canned without sugar, then, at time of use, reheated with sugar, the red Astrachan and Wealthy apples yield dishes that can scarcely be told from those made of fresh fruit.
Wash, pare, quarter, and core the apples.
Prepare enough for one can, dispose the quarters in cold water as finished, then drain and set to cook in about a cup of hot water, cover and let cook until boiling throughout, then pour into a sterilized can, filling it to overflow, adjust the rubber ring and cover, tightening the cover at once.
This is open-kettle canning: hot fruit is ladled into a jar, the lid is sealed, and the jar is never processed. The method was standard household practice around 1900 and has been rejected by every food-safety authority since the mid-twentieth century. The notes below explain the specific failure points rather than offering a revised procedure.
- No processing step at allThe apples are only brought to a boil in the pot, then sealed. Nothing heats the headspace, the underside of the lid, or the jar rim, so any mould spore, yeast or lactic bacterium that lands during filling survives inside a sealed, oxygen-poor jar. Current practice for apple pieces is a measured boiling-water process, timed by jar size and altitude, which this recipe has no equivalent of.
- The seal is a guess"Tightening the cover at once" produces a seal from cooling steam, if it produces one at all. Without a timed process there is no reliable vacuum, and no way to check for one; a jar can appear closed and still be drawing air over the following weeks.
- Why the acidity does not rescue itApples are high-acid, so Clostridium botulinum is not the main hazard here, which is why generations got away with the method. The real risks are heat-resistant moulds and spoilage organisms — some apple-associated moulds produce patulin — plus seal failure in fruit intended to sit until "late spring and early summer."
- Unsugared syrup makes it worse, not betterUnsugared fruit -- The recipe's whole point is canning without sugar. Sugar syrup at canning strengths is not counted as a preservative in any case, so its absence is not the main failure here.
- Glass-top jars and rubber ringsThe "rubber ring and cover" indicates a glass-lidded bail-wire or zinc-capped jar sealed against a rubber ring. Such rings perished and were often reused, and they are not part of any current tested method.
- The vessel language"Can" here means a glass jar, not a metal tin. The recipe does not say what size "one can" is, nor how many apples it takes. "Sterilized" in this period ordinarily meant jars boiled in water, which is a reasonable step but does nothing about the contents after filling.
- The varietiesRed Astrachan is a very early apple and Wealthy a fall one; neither was regarded as a long-keeper, which is why the author wanted them preserved. Both still exist in heritage orchards; modern supermarket varieties such as Fuji keep far longer.
- If you want canned applesUse a current tested recipe from a food-preservation extension service, which will specify jar size, headspace, and a timed boiling-water process. Read this page as a document of how the work was once done.
Canning manuals of this period were written for households with a cellar full of winter keepers and a glut of soft early apples that would not last past November, and the calculation the author opens with — that it does not pay to can what will keep on its own — is the whole logic of a fruit cellar in one sentence. Open-kettle filling, in which hot food goes straight into a jar and the lid is closed on the rising steam, was the ordinary domestic method well into the twentieth century; it was gradually displaced as home economics extension work established timed water-bath and pressure processing, and the practice is now uniformly advised against. The preference for unsweetened fruit reflected cost as much as taste: sugar was a real line in the household budget, and adding it at the moment of use rather than at canning time meant none was spent on jars that spoiled. Red Astrachan, a Russian variety long grown in American orchards, and Wealthy, generally traced to Peter Gideon's Minnesota breeding work in the 1860s, were both prized precisely for early cooking quality rather than keeping.