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Beets (Wash and scrub the beets)
Wash and scrub the beets, taking care that the skin is not broken or cut, or the roots broken off. Cover with boiling water and let cook until tender; drain, cover with cold water, and with the hands push off the skin; trim the top and bottom neatly and drop into a sterilized jar standing on a cloth in hot water. Put into the jar as many beets as possible; if large, they may be cut; adjust the sterilized rubber, fill the jar to overflow with boiling water, set the sterile lid in place, but do not fasten it; set the jar in a steamer, cover and let cook about ten minutes, then tighten the cover. Lacking a steamer or similar utensil, finish the beets in the oven. The jars must always be raised from the bottom of the receptacle in which the water is boiling, and each must stand apart from the others. Jars touching each other will break or crack at the point of contact.
This is a plain water-pack of a low-acid vegetable finished with about ten minutes of steam, and it belongs to a period before the microbiology of canning was understood. The method cannot be salvaged by adjusting the times given here.
- Beets are low-acidCooked beets sit around pH 5.3 to 6.0, well above the 4.6 threshold below which Clostridium botulinum cannot grow. Nothing in this recipe — no vinegar, no lemon, no brine — brings the jar into the acid range, so the sealed jar is an oxygen-free, low-acid environment at room temperature: the exact conditions the organism needs.
- Ten minutes of steam does nothing to sporesSteam and boiling water reach 212F. Botulinum spores can survive hours at that temperature; destroying them reliably in a low-acid pack requires 240F or above, which only a pressure canner achieves. The ten minutes here is enough to warm the jar and drive out a little air, not to make it shelf-stable.
- Oven finishing is worse, not a substituteThe suggested oven alternative has been discredited on two counts: dry air transfers heat far more slowly than steam, so the contents lag well behind the oven setting, and jars not designed for dry heat can fail. It was common advice in this era and is no longer given by any canning authority.
- The loose lid and overflow fillFilling to overflow leaves no headspace, so the jar cannot vent properly during heating and the seal formed by tightening a hot lid afterward is unreliable. A weak or failed seal on a low-acid pack may spoil visibly, or may not — botulinum toxin produces no reliable smell, gas or cloudiness.
- Pickled beets are a different recipeBeets are commonly and safely canned when packed in a vinegar solution of measured strength, which drops the pH below 4.6. That is not what is happening here, and adding a splash of vinegar to this procedure does not make it a tested pickle.
- What is still soundThe handling advice holds up: rubbing skins off after boiling and cooling, leaving the root and crown intact during cooking so the color does not bleed, and keeping jars off the bottom of the kettle and apart from one another to prevent thermal shock and cracking. Use a current tested recipe from a food-safety authority for the canning itself.
Books like this one appeared during the boom in domestic glass-jar canning that followed the spread of the screw-top Mason jar and its rubber sealing ring, and they were written just before the research that reshaped the field. Systematic work on the heat resistance of spoilage organisms in low-acid foods, and the resulting insistence on pressure processing for vegetables, meat and fish, came substantially from industry and academic laboratories — Prescott and Underwood, and the National Canners Association — as well as from the Department of Agriculture and the American agricultural experiment stations, from the late 1910s onward, and took decades to filter fully into household manuals. Until then, steam, boiling-water and oven methods were applied indiscriminately to everything from berries to beans, and the distinction that now governs all home canning — acid foods in a boiling-water bath, low-acid foods under pressure — simply had not been drawn. Beets themselves were a winter staple stored in sand or a root cellar; putting them up in glass was a matter of convenience and tidiness as much as preservation, which may explain the casual ten minutes.