Home › Preserving › Peaches (As the principal use)
Peaches (As the principal use)
As the principal use for canned peaches is sauce or in desserts where they need to be sweetened, peaches are usually canned with sugar. Prepare the peaches according to directions previously given. To a quart can allow about a dozen peaches and from one to two cups of sugar. Melt the sugar in a cup of boiling water. If the fruit is to be cooked in a saucepan, have but one layer of peaches. Let them cook, covered in the syrup, about ten minutes, or until the peaches can be pierced with a fork.
Have the jar, filled with hot water, standing on a cloth in a pan of hot water; empty the water from the jar, put in the peaches, then pour in the syrup to fill the jar to overflow; adjust the rubber ring and the cover and tighten the jar at once. Syrup left over may be used in starting another jar. Cook only one or two jars at a time. If there is not enough syrup to fill the jar, use boiling water.
Peaches No. 2 Make a syrup as in the first recipe for peaches, let boil four or five minutes. Fill the sterilized jars with the prepared fruit, shaking it down and putting in as many halves as the jar will take.
Let stand covered in the cooker until the water in the outer receptacle boils and the jars are
This is open-kettle canning: hot fruit and syrup are packed into a jar, the lid is tightened, and the jar is set aside to seal on its own. That method was standard in the early twentieth century and has been abandoned. The notes below explain what the text asks for and why the procedure no longer stands up.
- No processing step at allIn the first method the jar is sealed the moment it is filled and never heated again. Nothing sterilises the headspace, the underside of the lid or the rim, and the seal is formed by hand-tightening rather than by a vacuum pulled during processing. Modern practice requires a measured boiling-water process, timed and adjusted for altitude, for every jar of fruit.
- The second method is cut off mid-sentence"Peaches No. 2" stops at "until the water in the outer receptacle boils and the jars are" — the processing time, the water level and the finishing instructions are all missing. Even taken on its own terms the recipe cannot be followed to a conclusion.
- What goes wrong is spoilage, not botulismPeaches are acidic enough that Clostridium botulinum is not the concern here. The realistic outcomes of an unprocessed jar are yeast fermentation, and moulds such as Byssochlamys and Penicillium expansum, the latter a producer of the mycotoxin patulin. A false seal that holds for weeks and then fails is one recognised failure mode.
- Seals that no longer existThe recipe assumes a glass-lidded or zinc-capped jar closed with a separate rubber ring, tightened once at filling. Those rings perished, were reused, and gave seals that could not be verified. Current two-piece lids seal by vacuum during processing and are not comparable, so the instruction to "tighten the jar at once" translates to nothing useful.
- "The cooker" and the outer receptacleThe second method describes a hot-water bath canner or a purpose-built home cooker, in which filled jars stand inside an outer pan of water. The vessel is right in principle; what the text lacks is the timing and the water depth above the jar tops that make it work.
- The quantities are workable, the method is notAbout a dozen peaches to a quart, with one to two cups of sugar dissolved in a cup of boiling water, gives a heavy syrup, and heavier still at the top of that range. Sugar here is for flavour and texture, not preservation, and adding more will not compensate for the missing process.
- If you want to can peachesUse a current tested recipe with a stated boiling-water processing time and altitude adjustment. Read this page as a record of how it was once done.
Home canning manuals multiplied in the United States in the 1910s, pushed by extension services, women's clubs and wartime food-conservation campaigns that treated a full cellar shelf as a patriotic accomplishment. Peaches were among the most canned fruits in the country: the crop ripens fast, bruises faster, and a household with a bushel on the porch had days rather than weeks to deal with it. The open-kettle method described here, in which sterility was thought to come from the boiling syrup and a quickly tightened lid, was the ordinary domestic technique of the period and appears in book after book of the era. It was displaced over the following decades as laboratory work on jar seals and on heat penetration into packed fruit showed how often those seals failed, and processing in a boiling-water bath became the recommended practice.