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Raspberries for Sauce
6 quarts raspberries 4 cups sugar Heat one quart of the berries in a double boiler; when the berries are hot throughout and the juice runs freely, crush them with a wooden pestle and turn them into a napkin wrung out of hot water or two folds of cheesecloth, press out all the juice, add the sugar, heat to the boiling point and skim. Put the rest of the berries into four quart jars, set them into a canner or steam cooker, and gradually heat the jars; then pour in the boiling syrup, dividing it among the four jars, adjust the rubber rings and covers, and let cook five or six minutes, remove from the fire and tighten the jars. The jars must be filled to overflow, and if there is not enough of the raspberry syrup, use boiling water. If preferred, the berries may be cooked in the syrup in an open saucepan ten minutes, then transferred to the jars. Raspberries may also be canned without sugar. See blueberries.
This is a raspberry canning method from the era before tested processing schedules, and it cannot be followed safely today. The notes below explain the archaic equipment and language, and then why the process itself fails.
- The process is the problemThe berries and syrup get five or six minutes of heating in the jars, after which the jars are removed from the heat and the covers tightened. That is not a processing time at a known temperature; it is a brief warming followed by a seal formed as the contents cool. Nothing here guarantees that the jar interior reached, or held, a temperature sufficient to destroy spoilage organisms, and no current tested recipe for canned raspberries looks like this.
- Sealing after the heat is offTightening lids after the jars leave the canner, and relying on rubber rings under the covers, was ordinary practice in this book's period and has since been abandoned. Modern two-piece lids are designed to vent during a measured processing period and seal as the jar cools undisturbed. A seal produced any other way cannot be verified, and a jar that looks sealed may not be.
- Filled to overflowThe instruction to fill the jars to overflowing leaves no headspace, whereas tested directions specify a measured headspace; an overfilled jar is more likely to seal unreliably. Raspberries are high-acid fruit, so the botulism risk is low, but mould and yeast spoilage in an unsound jar is a real prospect, and mouldy canned fruit should be discarded rather than skimmed.
- If you want canned raspberriesUse a current tested boiling-water-bath recipe with a stated headspace and a stated processing time for your jar size and altitude. The historic text is worth reading as a document; it is not a working schedule.
- "A canner or steam cooker"In this period this meant a deep kettle with a rack, or a vessel that surrounded the jars with steam rather than boiling water. A deep kettle with a rack is close to what a boiling-water-bath canner still is; what is missing here is the measured processing time modern instructions assume.
- Napkin wrung out of hot waterA plain linen cloth, scalded, used as a jelly bag. Two layers of cheesecloth or a jelly bag does the same work. Wetting it first keeps the cloth from drinking up the juice.
- Wooden pestleA wooden masher or the end of a rolling pin. Wood was preferred because iron and tin discolored fruit and reacted with its acid; any non-reactive masher would serve the same purpose now.
- What "for sauce" meansThe proportion is light: four cups of sugar to six quarts of berries, about one cup of sugar to each of the four jars, which suggests fruit intended to be spooned over puddings, cake or cereal rather than eaten as a preserve. The book's own note that raspberries can be canned without sugar fits the same use.
Canning, Preserving and Jelly Making belongs to the last generation of American home-preserving books written before federal and state extension services began publishing tested processing times in the late 1910s and 1920s. Its methods are the ones generally said to have been in use in home kitchens for decades: a brief heating in the jar, rubber rings, and lids tightened by hand once the vessel came off the stove. The technique of drawing juice from one quart of berries to make syrup for the remaining five is a thrifty solution to a real problem. What the book could not supply, and what few cooks of the period are likely to have had, was any way to know the temperature inside a sealed jar; that knowledge, and the standardized bath times built on it, arrived only after laboratory work on spoilage organisms had been translated into household bulletins.