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To Have Fresh Fruit the Year Round
Use raspberries (red or black), red currants or long blackberries. Mash the fruit well and take 1 cup of fruit and 1 cup of granulated sugar alternately, Put in porcelain kettle, stir well several times during the 48 hours it should stand, then put in cans and cover. Do not cook. Keep in coolest place you have. I have prepared this every year for four years and have not had any spoil. -Mrs. David Soper, Straffordville, Ont.
This is an uncooked raw-fruit preserve put into sealed cans and kept at cellar temperature. It is a genuine period method, but it has no step that makes the jars safe for storage, and the points below explain where it breaks down rather than how to repair it.
- Nothing is ever heatedThe fruit, the sugar and the jars all stay at room temperature. There is no boil, no hot pack and no water-bath processing, so yeasts, moulds and the enzymes in the fruit all go into the can alive. "Do not cook" is the whole point of the recipe and also the reason it cannot be recommended.
- The sugar level is too low to preserveCup-for-cup by volume works out below the roughly 65 percent dissolved sugar usually cited as the level that makes a jam inhospitable to spoilage organisms, because a cup of mashed berries is mostly water while a cup of sugar weighs less than a cup of fruit.
- Sealed and unprocessed is the wrong combinationA closed can of raw sugared fruit will ferment. Fermenting fruit generates carbon dioxide, which means pressure against a sealed lid, and a sealed jar also hides the surface mould that would otherwise warn you off. Modern uncooked jams are deliberately kept in the refrigerator or freezer and treated as perishable.
- "The coolest place you have" is not a temperatureIn practice that meant an unheated cellar or a springhouse, cold in winter and considerably warmer by late summer. No fixed temperature is specified anywhere in the recipe, which is exactly the gap that makes the method unrepeatable.
- Four good years is not evidenceMrs. Soper's testimonial is honest and typical of community cookbooks, but a preserve that happens not to spoil in a cold Ontario cellar tells you nothing about the same jars in a modern kitchen cupboard. If you want a raw-tasting berry preserve, use a current tested freezer-jam recipe.
- The kettle, at least, was sound adviceA "porcelain kettle" means an enamelled pan. Acid fruit picks up metallic flavours and colour from bare cast iron, copper or aluminium, and enamel or stainless steel is still the right choice for any fruit preserve.
Raw or "cold" jams like this one appear in household cookery from the period before reliable refrigeration, and they persisted in community recipe collections because they tasted unmistakably of fresh fruit. The Five Roses Cook Book, published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and distributed with sacks of its flour, was assembled largely from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives, and the signed attribution to Mrs. David Soper of Straffordville, Ontario, with its four-year guarantee, is the book's characteristic form of authority: a neighbour's word rather than a tested procedure. The section heading, "To Have Fresh Fruit the Year Round," is the real selling point. Home canning guidance in North America only became systematic and temperature-based over the following decades, as agricultural extension services and government bulletins took the subject over from the recipe-swapping tradition this page belongs to.