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Preservation of Fruit and Vegetables by Canning, Etc: Store
BLACKBERRY JAM Put the berries in a preserving kettle, cover closely and let become hot, then with a wooden pestle press through a sieve fine enough to keep back the seeds. Measure the pulp and for each two cups take one cup of sugar. Heat slowly to the boiling point, stirring often. Let cook nearly half an hour, stirring almost constantly. Store as canned fruit, or cook an hour or more and store as jelly. This makes a particularly good sauce for cornstarch puddings and the like.
SUNSHINE STRAWBERRIES Put into the preserving kettle, in layers, as many pounds of sugar as of hulled, washed and drained strawberries. When the juice is drawn out a little, set over the fire to cook twenty minutes after boiling commences. Turn the berries into agate pans or earthen plates, cover with panes of glass and set in the sun. Let stand two days, stirring two or three times each day. Store without reheating in jars or glasses. The time of cooking may be cut down to ten minutes, if the fruit be left in the sun a day or two longer. GINGERED PEARS 4 pounds of pared-and-sliced 1/4 pound of ginger root pears 1 cup of water 3 small lemons 3 pounds of sugar Cut the ginger root as small as possible; add water to cover well and let simmer to make a strong decoction. Strain off the water, of which there should be one cup, add to it the lemons, cut in thin slices (discard the seeds), and let cook until the peel is tender; add the sugar and when dissolved the sliced pears and cook slowly until the pears are tender.
Three preserves from the storeroom chapter: a seedless blackberry jam, a solar strawberry preserve, and a syrupy gingered pear. The fruit-and-sugar cooking is sound period practice; the storage directions are not, and that is where the page fails.
- Why the cautionThe blackberry and strawberry recipes end with "store" and nothing else — no jar sterilising, no headspace, no boiling-water processing time or temperature; the gingered pears give no storage direction whatever. This is open-kettle canning, abandoned because filling jars from the kettle and letting them seal by cooling does not reliably exclude mould or yeast and gives no measured heat treatment to the jar contents. Use a current tested preserving recipe with a specified process time if you want shelf-stable jars.
- Sunshine strawberries specificallyThe berries are boiled for ten to twenty minutes, then spread in open pans under panes of glass in the sun for two or more days and jarred "without reheating." Fruit standing at ambient temperature for days under nothing but a sheet of glass is exposed to mould spores and wild yeast, and nothing afterwards kills what lands in it. This method cannot be brought within modern safe practice; it belongs to the history of the book, not to the kitchen.
- Preserving kettleA broad, shallow pan; period kettles were variously unlined copper or brass, or heavy enamelled ware. Any broad non-reactive pot works — width helps, because evaporation is part of what thickens the jam.
- Agate pansAgate ware is speckled enamelled steel, standard cheap kitchenware of the period. "Earthen plates" are simply glazed pottery. Both are non-reactive with fruit acid, which is presumably part of why they are named.
- Blackberry ratioTwo cups of sieved pulp to one cup of sugar is well below the near-equal weights modern jam recipes use, which is part of why it needs half an hour of near-constant stirring to set at all, and an hour or more for a jelly consistency. Low-sugar preserves scorch easily; keep the heat moderate and the spoon moving.
- Sieving the berriesHeating the berries covered until they collapse before pressing is the whole trick — cold blackberries give up little pulp and a great deal of seed. A food mill with a fine plate does the same job as the wooden pestle and sieve with far less effort.
- Ginger root quantityA quarter pound of fresh root is roughly 4 ounces, about a hand's worth, and the simmered-down cup of decoction it yields is genuinely fierce. If you are working from dried or ground ginger the quantity does not translate; the recipe depends on a water extraction of fresh root.
- Lemons and pears"Three small lemons" sliced thin, peel and all, supplies both acid and pectin; simmer them until the peel is soft before the sugar goes in, since sugar sets peel and it will never soften afterwards. Four pounds of pared, sliced pears is roughly ten to twelve medium fruit; firm slightly underripe pears hold their shape, ripe ones go to mush.
"Sunshine" preserves of this kind were a recurring enthusiasm in American cookbooks around the turn of the twentieth century: the claim was that sun-thickened fruit kept a fresher colour and a brighter flavour than fruit boiled long enough to set on the stove, and the panes of glass over the pans served as both a greenhouse and a screen against flies. Gingered pears belong to a different tradition — hard, gritty cooking pears were nearly inedible raw, and steeping them in a strong ginger decoction with lemon turned an awkward crop into a condiment for cold meat. The blackberry jam's closing note, that it makes a good sauce for cornstarch puddings, is a reminder that preserves in this period were as much a sauce cupboard as a breakfast spread.