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Canning Pineapple
Can the pineapple when it is cheapest in your locality. With a knife trim off the outside and take out "the eyes." The next step will depend upon the use you are to make of the fruit. A round slice with a hole in the center, where the core has been removed, is pretty for many desserts; lengthwise slices are favored in some tropical countries, and pieces picked from the core with a silver fork, the fork following the natural lines of division, are good for use in salads and cocktails. For use in omelets, soufflés, Bavarian cream, and punch, grated pineapple is preferable. The fruit is canned just as successfully without sugar as with it, and the omission of the sugar simplifies the preparation of a dish in which the pineapple is used with other ingredients. In canning in an open kettle, cook until tender; in the jar, cook about half an hour. Fill the jars with hot water or syrup (a cup of sugar to a can), as is desired.
This is a home-canning procedure, and the parts that matter most for safety — the seal, the processing method, and the processing time at a stated temperature — are either missing or given in a form no longer considered adequate. The notes below explain the gaps rather than patching them.
- Open-kettle canning is the core problem"Cooking in an open kettle" and then filling jars relies on hot fruit and hot liquid to sterilise the jar and pull a seal as it cools. That method was abandoned decades ago because the jar headspace, the rim, and the underside of the lid are never brought to processing temperature, and seals formed this way fail unpredictably. Every current tested procedure for pineapple ends with a timed boiling-water bath after the jars are filled and closed.
- "Cook about half an hour" in the jar specifies nothingThere is no water level, no indication that the water must be at a full boil, no jar size, and no adjustment for altitude — all four of which change the outcome. A processing instruction without a temperature and a jar size is not a processing instruction.
- Sugar is not what preserves thisThe author is right that pineapple cans as well without sugar, but that is because pineapple is a high-acid fruit, not because the syrup is doing anything. Syrup affects texture, colour and flavour only. Omitting it does not make the pack more perishable, and adding it does not make an under-processed jar safe.
- High acid narrows the risk but does not remove itRipe pineapple sits low enough on the pH scale that Clostridium botulinum is not the usual concern; spoilage yeasts and moulds are. Surface moulds on canned fruit can metabolise the acid and raise the pH of the contents over time, which is why visibly mouldy fruit jars are discarded rather than skimmed. Fruit that is overripe or bruised is also the least acidic, and the recipe says nothing about selecting for ripeness or soundness — only about price.
- "A cup of sugar to a can" is an unspecified quantityThe book does not say what size vessel "a can" is, and the sugar is stirred into hot water in an unstated volume. There is no way to reconstruct the syrup strength from the text.
- Jar hardware has changed completelyJars of the kind likely behind this recipe were glass-lidded or zinc-capped with a separate rubber ring, tightened by hand; the recipe itself specifies no closure. Modern two-piece lids seal by a different mechanism and follow different filling and tightening instructions, so the hand-me-down technique does not transfer.
- The knife work is still soundThe descriptions of the cuts — rings with the core punched out, lengthwise spears, chunks pulled along the natural grain with a fork, grated flesh for creams and punch — are good practical guidance for fresh pineapple and worth keeping. The silver fork was specified because ordinary steel of the period discoloured acid fruit; stainless is fine.
- If you want to put pineapple upUse a current tested recipe from a reliable canning authority, which will state jar size, headspace, syrup, and a timed water-bath process with altitude adjustment.
Home canning of pineapple only makes sense in a book of this era because of how quickly the fruit had become cheap and seasonal on the mainland. Through the nineteenth century pineapple was a luxury import that spoiled in transit; the growth of Caribbean and Florida production, together with faster steamships, dropped fresh pineapple into American markets in gluts that lasted a few weeks and then vanished. Commercial canneries in Hawaii were industrialising the same problem at the same moment. The list of intended uses is a good index of period dessert cookery: Bavarian cream, souffl eexactly where a jar of grated pineapple earned its keep, and the observation that unsweetened fruit is more useful in mixed dishes is a genuinely practical piece of advice that survived long after the canning method did.