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Canned Beets
Boil the beets till tender, drop in cold water, remove and skin. If too large for jars, cut lengthwise in halves or quarters.
Warm the jar and, as fast as the beets are skinned, drop them in until the jar is nearly full. To 1 pint vinegar add 2 cups sugar, set on stove and let come to a boil.
While boiling, pour over the beets until the jar is running over. Drop in a few cloves and allspice, then seal.
This is open-kettle canning, a method that was standard in home kitchens a century ago and is no longer considered safe for any vegetable. The problems are specific to how this jar is filled and sealed.
- No processing step at allThe beets are packed hot, covered with boiling syrup, and sealed immediately. Nothing brings the sealed jar to a sustained temperature, and the seal itself is formed by cooling steam rather than by a verified process. Current guidance for pickled beets calls for a measured boiling-water bath with a stated time for the jar size and altitude.
- Beets are a low-acid vegetableRaw beets sit around pH 5 to 6. Safety in a pickle depends entirely on the finished product being acidified below pH 4.6 throughout, and this recipe gives no way to know whether that has happened.
- The acid is diluted and unmeasuredOne pint of vinegar of unstated strength is cut with two cups of sugar, then poured over a jar packed nearly full of hot, water-logged beets carrying their own cooking liquid. The volume of beet in the jar is never specified, so the final acidity of the brine is unknowable.
- Boiling does not kill the relevant organismClostridium botulinum spores survive boiling temperatures. In a sealed, oxygen-free jar of insufficiently acidified vegetables held at room temperature, they can germinate and produce toxin. This is the classic failure mode for home-canned low-acid produce.
- Whole spices added at the endCloves and allspice are dropped in after the syrup, introducing unheated material into a jar that receives no further heat treatment. Whole spices can also carry soil organisms.
- "Seal" meant something differentAt the time this meant a glass lid with a rubber ring and a wire bail, or a zinc cap over a rubber ring. Neither behaves like a modern two-piece lid, and neither offers any evidence that a safe process was achieved. A sealed jar is not a sterile jar.
- If you want pickled beetsUse a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority, with specified vinegar strength, headspace, jar size and boiling-water processing time. Alternatively, dress cooked beets with the same vinegar, sugar and spices and keep them in the refrigerator as a short-keeping pickle.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg and distributed to buyers of Five Roses flour; its recipes were largely gathered from Canadian housewives, which is why so many entries read like a neighbour's note rather than a tested formula. Beets kept well in a root cellar through a Canadian winter, but a sweet-sour pickle turned a plain storage vegetable into something for the relish dish, and the sugar-heavy syrup here is closer to a dessert pickle than to the sharp brines used for cucumbers. The instruction to "pour over the beets until the jar is running over" is the whole of the technique: overflowing the jar drove out air, and the cooling contents pulled the lid down. Home canning only moved onto a scientific footing over the following decades, as agricultural extension services began publishing tested processing times for each vegetable and jar size, and open-kettle methods like this one were steadily withdrawn from official advice.