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Brussels Sprouts
Pick over, discard imperfect leaves, wash, and set over the fire in boiling water to cover; let boil five minutes, then skim into jars, shaking the sprouts down to fill the jars compactly; set the jars in the usual manner in the canner or cooker, fill with boiling water, set the lids beside the jars; cover the large receptacle and let boil until the sprouts are nearly tender; adjust the rubber rings, fill the jars to overflow with boiling salted water, set the covers in place, cover the receptacle, and let cook ten to fifteen minutes after boiling begins, then fasten down the lids.
This is a boiling-water canning method applied to a low-acid vegetable, and it is one of the procedures that twentieth-century food science specifically overturned. The notes below explain why the page is worth reading but not following.
- The core problem: no pressureBrussels sprouts have a pH well above 4.6, the threshold below which Clostridium botulinum spores cannot germinate. Nothing in this method exceeds 212F, and botulinum spores routinely survive hours at that temperature. Only a pressure canner, which reaches 240-250F, destroys them in a sealed low-acid jar.
- The salted water does not helpThe brine here is for flavour, not preservation. Canning salt at the concentration used in vegetable packs is far too dilute to inhibit botulinum, and the spores are anaerobic, so a sealed oxygen-free jar is exactly the environment they prefer.
- "Nearly tender" is not a process timeSafe canning depends on a measured time at a measured temperature for a specified jar size. This recipe gives a doneness cue for the sprouts and then ten to fifteen minutes more, none of which corresponds to any validated process.
- Lids fastened after processingThe instruction to set covers in place loosely, cook, then fasten down reflects the glass-top-and-rubber-ring jars of the period. Modern two-piece lids seal during cooling and are not tightened after processing; the technique does not transfer.
- Spoilage you cannot seeBotulinum toxin produces no reliable off smell, no cloudiness and no bulging in every case. There is no inspection step that makes a jar of home-canned sprouts processed this way trustworthy.
- If you want to keep sproutsFreezing after a brief blanch, or refrigerator pickling in a properly acidified vinegar brine, are the routes home cooks use now. For anything shelf-stable, follow a current tested recipe from a food-safety authority rather than this one.
Janet McKenzie Hill's canning manual belongs to the last generation of American preserving books written before the science of low-acid canning was settled. The "canner or cooker" of the period was usually a wash boiler or a purpose-made water bath, and the standard advice for vegetables was long or repeated boiling — the intermittent or "fractional" sterilisation that some household writers borrowed from bacteriological laboratories. It was a reasonable inference from what was then known about killing bacteria, and it failed because heat-resistant spores were not yet part of the domestic picture. Botulism was identified in the nineteenth century, chiefly in European sausages, and the connection to home-canned vegetables in the United States became clear in the 1920s and 1930s, after which the U.S. Department of Agriculture pushed the pressure canner for anything that was not high-acid fruit.