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Canned Fruit
Fruit keeps equally well put up either with or without sugar. Fruit-juice to be used for jelly, sherbet, pudding sauces, etc., should be put up without sugar. Fruit for table use should have enough sugar added to make it palatable. The sugar is often added in the form of syrup. To make the syrup, use one cup of water to two or three cups of sugar, according to the acidity of the fruit. Melt the sugar in the water (boiling water will act more quickly than cold water), wash down the sides of the saucepan with the tips of the fingers wet in cold water, then cover the pan and let boil three or four minutes. Sometimes the syrup is made of sugar and fruit-juice in the place of water, and sometimes honey replaces the sugar in whole or part.
Blueberries (No Sugar) Pick over, wash, and drain the blueberries, dispose them in sterilized jars, shaking down and adding as many berries as possible to each jar.
Adjust the rubber rings, set the jars on the racks, the covers beside them, put on the cover of the receptacle, and heat the water gradually to the boiling point. When the berries are hot throughout and have settled in the jars, use those in one jar to fill three or more, adjust the sterile covers but do not fasten them, let cook ten minutes, then tighten the jars and remove to a board. These berries are canned without sugar or water. If more convenient, berries may be cooked in a saucepan to finish filling the jars.
Blueberries (Sugar) Fill the jars with berries as before, make a syrup in the proportion of one cup of sugar to half a cup of water, then when the jars are filled with berries, set them in the cooker, pour in the syrup to fill, let cook about fifteen minutes, wipe the rim of the jars, adjust the rubber rings, first dipping them in boiling water, syrup to fill the jars to overflow, set the sterilized add covers in place, and tighten the jars. These berries are to be eaten as a sauce. The point in their favor is that they are ready to serve.
Quite as good results may be obtained if the berries are canned without sugar and reheated with sugar the day of serving.
Blueberries No. 3 Stew the berries in a saucepan, adding about a cup of water to four quarts of berries, - just enough to keep them from burning; add sugar, - a cup and a half to two quarts of berries, — if desired; when boiling throughout, turn into sterilized jars, filling them to overflow; adjust rubber rings (dipped in boiling water) and sterilized covers, and tighten the covers at once.
For use in pies, put up without sugar.
The syrup ratios and the general approach here are sound, but the canning procedure itself predates any tested process standard, and two of the three blueberry methods would fail a modern safety review outright.
- Why this one failsNone of the three methods gives a verified process. Jars are heated in an unspecified "cooker" of unspecified water depth for ten to fifteen minutes counted from an unstated point, with no headspace, no altitude adjustment, and no requirement that the water cover the jars. Blueberries are genuinely high-acid (roughly pH 3.1 to 3.4), so botulism is not the primary danger, but under-processing leaves yeasts, moulds and heat-resistant spoilage organisms alive in a sealed jar. Use a current tested process from a food-safety authority instead.
- Method No. 3 is open-kettle canningStewing the fruit, pouring it hot into jars and tightening the lids at once with no further processing was common practice in the period and has been rejected for decades. The jar interior is recontaminated as it is filled, the seal formed by cooling vapour is unreliable, and failures are often invisible until the jar is opened.
- Rubber rings and the vesselsThe "sterilized covers" and "rubber rings" indicate a jar of the period sealed by a separate rubber gasket, either the glass-lidded wire-bail type or a screw-cap Mason; the text does not say which. Old gaskets perish, and bail jars sold today are generally storage jars rather than tested canning jars.
- "The receptacle" and "racks"This is the period name for a water-bath canner or a stockpot fitted with a wire rack. The text never says how far the water should come up the jars, and that ambiguity is precisely what makes the timings here unusable.
- Sterilizing jars is not processingThe text leans on sterile jars and sterile covers doing the work. Sterile glass matters, but it does not substitute for bringing the contents of a sealed jar to temperature for a measured time.
- The syrup ratios, for referenceOne cup water to two or three cups sugar is heavier than what would now be called a very heavy syrup; the one cup sugar to half a cup of water in the sugared blueberries is the same 2:1 proportion as the lightest of these. The instruction to wash down the pan sides with wet fingers is to dissolve stray crystals that would seed the syrup and make it grainy, and it is still good practice for any sugar syrup.
- Sugar is not a preservative hereThe book is correct that fruit keeps equally well with or without sugar. At these concentrations sugar affects colour, texture and flavour, not shelf stability, which is a useful thing to know when reading any preserving book of the period.
This comes from the tradition of domestic-science canning manuals, produced when home preserving was being rewritten from a craft handed down in families into something taught with thermometers, timings and sterilized equipment. The transitional character shows plainly on this page: the author insists on sterile jars, sterile covers and rubber rings dipped in boiling water, yet still offers open-kettle canning as method No. 3, exactly the practice that later extension bulletins would try to stamp out. The remark that berries canned plain and reheated with sugar on the day of serving are "quite as good" is a small piece of period economy, and a jar of unsweetened fruit could go to pie, sauce, sherbet or jelly as the week required, and sugar was worth saving.