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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Sweet Pickled Carrots
Wash and scrape six or eight medium-sized carrots. Boil in slightly salted water until they can be pierced with a fork; then drain and dash cold water over them. Put one pint of cider vinegar in a stewpan and add three cups of sugar (one brown and two of white) and one teaspoonful each of cloves, cinnamon, and cassia buds. Let the syrup boil, then slice in as many carrots as the syrup will take. Cover and cook slowly for half an hour, then store in cans as in all canning.
This is an open-kettle sweet pickle from the era before tested processing schedules, and the canning instruction at the end is the part that fails. The notes below explain the terms and then the hazard.
- Why it cannot be canned this wayCarrots are a low-acid vegetable, around pH 6, and safety here depends entirely on the finished pickle being acidified below pH 4.6. The recipe never fixes a ratio: "as many carrots as the syrup will take" can mean anything, and a pint of vinegar diluted by three cups of sugar and a large load of carrot can land well above that line.
- "Store in cans as in all canning"The recipe defers to whatever general canning method the book teaches elsewhere, which in this period was most often open-kettle canning: ladle the hot product into jars, seal, and let the heat of the contents form the vacuum. On that reading there is no boiling-water processing, so the jar contents are never held at a verified temperature for a verified time, and the seal itself is unreliable.
- The specific pathogenClostridium botulinum spores survive boiling, are common on root vegetables pulled from soil, and germinate in a sealed, oxygen-free, low-acid jar at room temperature. Sweetness and spice do nothing to prevent this. A current tested recipe from a reliable canning authority should be used instead.
- Cassia budsThe dried immature fruit of the cassia tree, often loosely called flower buds, sold whole in spice shops a century ago and still available from specialty suppliers. They taste like a milder, slightly floral cinnamon; here they appear alongside the cinnamon rather than in place of it.
- Cider vinegar strengthVinegar of the period was not standardised. Modern bottled cider vinegar is 5 percent acetic acid, and vinegar labelled below 5 percent, as some artisan and unfiltered bottlings are, should not be used for pickling or preserving.
- The spice quantitiesA teaspoon each of cloves, cinnamon and cassia buds against one pint of vinegar is assertive by current taste, and the cloves in particular will darken the syrup and the carrots over time.
Sweet spiced pickles of this type — vinegar, a heavy hand of sugar, and the warm spices of cloves and cinnamon — were the standard American treatment for anything firm and slightly sweet: peaches, crabapples, watermelon rind, beets, and here carrots. The presence of cassia buds dates the recipe as much as anything else does; they were a common grocery-shelf spice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and have since largely disappeared from home kitchens. Books like this one belong to the period when glass jars with rubber-ringed lids had made home canning available to almost every household, but before federal and extension canning bulletins — which date from the First World War period onward — had settled the processing times and acidity limits that made it reliably safe. The confident brevity of "store in cans as in all canning" is exactly what that gap looked like in print.