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To Can Fruit
As a general proportion allow two cups of water to one of sugar for the lighter canning syrup. Prepare the fruit and pack closely in the jars to be used, which should be sterilised by placing cans, rubbers, funnel, spoons, and tops in cold water, bringing to boiling point and boiling for five minutes. Meantime have ready the syrup, skimming when it has boiled. (Very little water should be used with the juicy fruits and the amount of sugar may be lessened or omitted entirely if the fruit is to be used for cooking purposes.) Place the fruit in the hot jars, (tops loose) filling up with the syrup; then putjarsin a boiler on a false bottom of slats, perforated wood, or some soft material (as hay or cloth) having the surface even, and so packing in the jars with the hay, etc., that they do not touch or move about with the motion of the (later) boiling water. Fill the boiler to the necks of the jars with lukewarm water; place the boiler-cover on over the fire and let water heat gradually. After it reaches boiling point let it boil twenty minutes for small fruits and longer for the heavier kinds, then remove the cover; pull the boiler back for convenience when the steam has disappeared. Remove the jars singly, placing them in a shallow pan of boiling water; fill up with boiling syrup and seal. Be sure that all air bubbles are gone. Place again on perforated board to cool where there are no draughts. The covers may have to be tightened before setting away.
Another method is to fill the jars with the fruit, adding a half cup of granulated sugar for each pint of fruit, sifting it into the jars (with no water). Proceed then as above till jars are to be removed when fill each one up with boiling water or boiling syrup (either syrup prepared or from one of the other jars of fruit).
Set jars in a dark place, or wrap each one in paper. The old rule for the richer preserves is pound for pound of sugar and fruit.
For jelly the general rule is pint for pound of fruit juice and sugar, but this must vary with the kind or condition of fruit. With very sweet fruit the quantity of sugar should be less than the measure of syrup. Avoid making jelly (or icing or candies) on rainy or damp days. Choose a dry and if possible a sunny day. Never squeeze the fruit in jelly-bag but first wring out the bag in hot water to avoid any waste of juice. In using spices place them in cheesecloth bags and remove them before the jars are sealed for the more delicate pickles or spiced fruits as the spice will darken the fruit and tend to make it look old (see Citron Melon in Jelly, under Melons).
This is a general home-canning method from the era of zinc caps, glass lids and reusable rubber rings, and it does not meet any current standard for preserving fruit. The reasons are specific and worth understanding.
- The processing time is not a time"Twenty minutes for small fruits and longer for the heavier kinds" leaves the heaviest work — halved pears, quinces, whole plums, figs — entirely to the cook's judgement. Modern water-bath schedules are set per fruit, per jar size, per pack style and per altitude, because underprocessing is invisible until the jar spoils.
- The jars are opened after processingThe instruction to remove each jar, top it up with boiling syrup and only then seal breaks the whole point of in-jar processing. Every jar is re-exposed to air, ladles and room dust at the moment it should be sealing, and the syrup used to top up may come from another jar.
- No headspace, no vacuumNo headspace, no reliable vacuum -- Filling to the brim and then tightening the covers again after the jars have cooled works against a dependable seal. Sealing a hot jar does draw some vacuum as it cools, but the recipe leaves no headspace, gives no way to confirm the seal and describes no check the next day. That is the classic route to a slow, quiet spoilage.
- Low-acid fruits are the real hazardMost fruit is acidic enough that spoilage shows up as mould or fermentation. Figs, some Asian pears and ripe tomatoes sit near or above pH 4.6, where Clostridium botulinum can grow in an anaerobic jar. Current practice adds measured lemon juice or citric acid to exactly these fruits; this recipe has no acidification step at all.
- Sugar is not the preservative hereThe recipe explicitly allows the sugar to be "lessened or omitted entirely." That is fine for flavour and texture, but it removes any water-activity effect, leaving heat processing and seal integrity as the only safeguards — both of which are unspecified.
- Rubbers and equipmentThe five-minute boil of "cans, rubbers, funnel, spoons, and tops" reflects reusable rubber rings, which perished with use and were a known cause of seal failure. Modern two-piece lids have a single-use sealing compound and are not interchangeable with this procedure.
- What to use insteadFor canned fruit, jam or jelly, follow a current tested recipe with stated processing times and altitude adjustments. The historical parts of this page worth keeping are the ratios and the technique notes, not the process.
- The ratios, for reading"Pound for pound" preserves and "pint for pound" jelly (a pint of juice to a pound of sugar) are still recognisable to anyone who makes jam without commercial pectin. The advice never to squeeze the jelly bag is sound — pressure forces pulp through and clouds the jelly.
Boiling jars in a wash boiler on a slatted false bottom, packed round with hay or cloth so they would not knock together, was a standard American home-canning method for the second half of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. It rested on John Landis Mason's 1858 patent for a screw-necked glass jar, on which the cap-and-ring sealing system was built, and which put preserving within reach of ordinary households; the wash boiler was simply the largest vessel a kitchen was likely to own. The economics of the page show through in the aside that sugar "may be lessened or omitted entirely if the fruit is to be used for cooking purposes" sugar was a real expense, and fruit put up for pies did not need it. The warning against making jelly on a damp day is traditional rather than chemical, though there is a grain of truth behind it: damp air slows the evaporation that concentrates boiling juice, and humidity does soften finished icings and candies. Bottled fruit pectin only became widely available in the 1910s, and the jelly rule here has to be hedged with "this must vary with the kind or condition of fruit" the cook was relying on the fruit's own pectin and on her own judgment of the boiling syrup.