Important: Safety Warning
This page describes home-canning methods from before the causes of botulism were understood. Canning low-acid foods without a pressure canner, as described here, can allow the growth of Clostridium botulinum, whose toxin is among the deadliest known. Follow current USDA home-canning guidelines instead.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Red Raspberries with Currant Juice
Fill the jars with the fruit, shaking down well (but do not crush). Adjust covers and rubbers and place in a kettle of cold water in the same manner as previously explained. Then bring to boiling-point and boil until the steam will issue from the jar of fruit when opened. Lift from the kettle and fill to the brim with a hot (boiling) syrup made in the proportion of one cup of sugar, half a cup of water, and, - for a pint can of raspberries, - one tablespoonful of currant juice. The currant juice gives the berries such a rich flavor that those canned without it seem flat in comparison.
Raspberries Canned without Cooking Mix together raspberries and sugar, pound for pound or bulk for bulk; with a silver fork or wooden pestle crush the fruit and sugar until every berry is broken. Have ready jars sterilized in boiling water; empty the jars and fill to overflow with the berries and sugar; adjust new rubbers and sterilized covers and fasten them securely. Store in a dark place.
These are particularly good for shortcakes and have the exact flavor of freshly picked fruit.
Currants Canned without Cooking Can the currants in the same manner as the raspberries, except allow one pound and quarter of sugar to each pound of currants. sure that each individual currant is crushed. a Be Canning Berries without Cooking No. 2 Wash, drain, and pack berries in jars. Shake down so as to get in as many as possible. Put jars, when filled, in hot water to get thoroughly warmed through. Make a syrup by using the same amount of sugar you would in canning berries the ordinary way. Put over berries boiling hot, let bubbles escape, put on lids, set in boiling hot water, cover up and leave until cold. These have a delicious flavor.
This is a set of pre-standardisation canning directions, written before processing times were tied to jar size, altitude and a measured temperature. The berry recipes are readable as history, but none of the four methods here meets any current standard for shelf-stable preserving.
- No processing time is given anywhere"Boil until the steam will issue from the jar of fruit when opened" is a sensory cue, not a process. Every modern berry canning procedure specifies minutes in a boiling-water bath for a stated jar size, and adjusts upward above 1,000 feet. Without that, there is no way to know the contents ever reached and held a lethal temperature.
- The jar is opened mid-processOpening the jar to check for steam, then topping it with syrup and resealing, recontaminates the headspace after heating. Current practice is to fill, seal and process once, and never to break the seal for a top-up.
- Open-kettle sealingSealing by residual heat — The last method — hot syrup over warm berries, lids on, jars set in boiling hot water, covered and left until cold — has no timed process at all; the jars are simply allowed to cool in the water. Like open-kettle sealing, it produces a vacuum by cooling rather than by measured processing, and the seal can look sound while yeasts and moulds grow underneath.
- The uncooked jars are not preserved at allCrushed raw raspberries with an equal weight of sugar, sealed cold, rely entirely on sugar concentration. At pound-for-pound the water activity is not low enough to be reliably shelf-stable; these ferment, weep alcohol, or grow surface mould. The instruction to "store in a dark place" is doing all the work, and it is not enough.
- Rubber ring closures"New rubbers" refers to the separate rubber gasket used with glass-lidded or zinc-capped jars. Current tested home-canning procedures are written for the two-piece metal lid with its bonded sealing compound, which behaves differently and is not a drop-in substitute for these directions.
- Acidity is not the reassurance it looks likeRaspberries and currants are high-acid, so *Clostridium botulinum* is not the concern here. The realistic failures are spoilage organisms — moulds, osmophilic yeasts, and the heat-resistant moulds that survive under-processing in fruit — which spoil the jar and, in some cases, raise the pH enough to matter over long storage.
- Quantities that are clear enough to noteThe syrup is one cup sugar to half a cup water, with a tablespoon of currant juice per pint jar — a heavy syrup by modern reckoning. The currant version calls for a pound and a quarter of sugar per pound of fruit.
- If you want to make itUse a current tested procedure from a food-preservation authority for raspberries in syrup, or simply freeze the crushed sugared berries — which is what the "without cooking" recipes were really reaching for when they promised "the exact flavor of freshly picked fruit."
Currant juice turns up constantly alongside raspberries in Anglo-American preserving books, and for a good reason: red currants are notably rich in pectin and acid, while raspberries are lower in pectin. A tablespoon per pint sharpens a fruit that goes flat and cloying under heavy syrup, which is exactly the effect the writer describes. The four methods stacked on this page also catch home canning at an awkward moment. By the early twentieth century the water-bath kettle was common household equipment, but the science of processing — time as a function of jar size, acidity and altitude — was still being worked out by agricultural experiment stations and had not yet reached most household cookbooks. So the instructions read by eye and by steam, and the "without cooking" shortcuts, which trade a boiling kettle for a very large quantity of sugar, sat comfortably beside them. Home currant growing has since declined sharply in North America, partly because the plants were widely banned in the early 1900s as an alternate host for white pine blister rust; that is one reason a flavouring the author treats as obvious now reads as obscure.