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Fruit Recipes
to each pound of fruit. Steam fruit till tender when place in heated jars. Meantime have the syrup boiling five minutes and pour over the fruit. Let stand in the hot water bath in oven or on top the stove for thirty minutes, then fill up with syrup and seal.
This is a fragment — the page begins mid-sentence, and the sugar and water quantities that belonged to the phrase "to each pound of fruit" are on the preceding page. What survives is a method for canning pears in syrup, and the method itself is the problem.
- The recipe is incompleteThe syrup ratio, the one proportion the method depends on, is missing. Nothing here tells you how much sugar to how much water, or how many jars a batch fills.
- Oven canning is not a hot water bath"Let stand in the hot water bath in oven" describes a practice that was common in the period and has since been abandoned. Air in an oven transfers heat far more slowly than boiling water, the jar contents never reliably reach 212F, and glass jars under dry heat can shatter. No current canning authority permits it.
- No processing temperature is givenThirty minutes at an unstated temperature is not a process. Modern canning specifies both time and temperature, adjusted for jar size and altitude, because the two together are what determine whether the contents are actually sterilised.
- Sealing after processingThe jars stand uncovered through the thirty minutes and are topped up with syrup and sealed only at the end, so the closure and the added liquid get no heat treatment at all. Current practice seals before processing and does not disturb the jar afterwards.
- If you want to can pearsIf you want to can fruit in syrup -- Use a current tested procedure from a food-preservation authority, which will give jar size, headspace, any needed acidification and a processing time in boiling water. Do not adapt the instructions above.
Fruit canning at home moved from a specialist skill to a routine autumn chore across the second half of the nineteenth century, after screw-band and clamp-top glass jars became cheap and widely available. Household books of the period are full of methods like this one ack hot, cover with boiling syrup, hold it warm for a set stretch of time written with confidence but almost no numbers. Oven processing was later discredited, once laboratory work on heat penetration showed how poorly dry air heats the centre of a packed jar.